


Saint of Heretics

by PhoenixAvalon



Category: The Grisha Trilogy - Leigh Bardugo
Genre: Alina is the ancient immortal and Aleksander is the never before seen darkling, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, F/M, all my favorite subjects ahead and more, don't worry mom it's rated T nothing too graphic can or will happen, finally contributing to this fandom at last, like discussions on religion morality politics society psychology romance and sex, nothing stops the no chill train, strap in ladies and gentlemen this is going to be the ride of your life if i can help it, that means there will be a whole lot of topsy turvy-ing with the canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2018-09-22 17:40:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 41,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9618284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixAvalon/pseuds/PhoenixAvalon
Summary: For six hundred years Sankta Alina has ruled as the physical personification of the nation of Ravka's spiritual and national identity. With the persecuted Grisha flocking to her side as a fanatically devoted army and aligning with the Lantsov family to establish an unbroken line of ruling tsars, under her reign Ravka has risen from a dark age of unending warfare to a unified kingdom bound by peace.But after six hundred years under the heat of an unrelenting queen of the sun, Ravka is suffocating from the traditions and laws of the past. Once meant simply to preserve and protect Ravkan culture and lives, it is employed to ruthlessly strangle and suppresses any attempt of progress.Now the land is boiling with rebellion and revolution and the question is being whispered all over the land: "If the people have grown ready to rule themselves, what place is there for the ancient Mother of Ravka?"Then, down from a mountainside in the heart of Ravka, comes a black-haired boy with grey eyes and a power unseen in any Grisha for six hundred years. The scales are precariously balanced, which side will his power uplift and which will it bring low?





	1. Prologue

 

_When she had seen with her own eyes these terrible things, Sankta Alina lifted up her voice in a great cry that rent her hands open and out poured forth a light as great in brilliance and mighty in heat as the sun._

_And it devoured the horde, their horses and their armor, their swords and spears, their flesh and their bones, even their ash was consumed by the light._

- _“The First Book of Saints”,_ written in the twenty-fifth year of the rule of Nikolai Lantsov I, the Uniter and first saintly anointed Tsar of Ravka

 

*

 

The story had been retold so many times that the woman had become numb to it a long time ago. A strange thing, to be dulled by the fiery baptism your own story.

She no longer was certain what aspects she had absorbed from the differing depictions. 

Was the sound of approaching horde of raiders the real thunderous beating of hooves or the clattering produced by metal pans clanging behind curtains on a stage?

Were the ashen faces wide-eyed and mouth agape the imprinted memory of her parents, relatives and neighbors or were they the masked and made-up faces of actors performing before a banquet?

Could searing and scourging whiteness that emitted from her hands and engulfed the world around her, eating at the air, the flesh, and her soul, have truly appeared that brilliant or was that only in the illuminated icons meticulously painted by artists and hung in the houses of every soul in Ravka?

Had the pain she felt, an anguish so unfathomable, immeasurable and all-encompassing that it ripped and ruptured through her like an inferno erupting in her half-starved child’s body, been so acute it produced such a transformation not only in her but an entire kingdom?

A strange thing, for an experience so intimately personal, to become the inheritance, history and foundation of a nation of people not then yet formed.

But Saints, like nations and like people, were born of blood and pain.

“Everything in the world is made up of matters of the spirit, the business of ruling, and the conceiving of children,” the first Apparat had once told her. “Outside of these, nothing exists.”

In six hundred years, Sankta Alina had seen nothing to disprove his words. There was a deep comfort in the surety of it, and a profound desolation of the intransigence of it all.

The wheel of the world and time circled and spun, but the axel never drifted.

That was a good proverb. She would have the new Apparat record it, in perhaps the next generation it would be a saying throughout all of Ravka.

 

* 

 

Anatevka was a village in the south of Ravka, one so out of the way even the wilderness seemed to give up reaching it, the trees thinned out to nothing and the grass came up in half-hearted sprouts that would barely feed a single goat.

Despite residing directly before the border of Fjerda there had never been any attacks, none that anyone could recall even amongst the most ancient elders, doubled over as if hunched against time, their flesh withered and browned like a dead leaf with age.

This was courtesy of the line of mountains that hemmed the horizon, jagged and broken teeth against a flat and broad sky that hung so low the clouds scrapped the mountaintops, leaving them frosted white with ice. These everlasting border guards were dubbed “The Saint’s Crown” by map makers, citing the way in which the snowcaps shone jewel-like in the sunlight, but the people of the village had a name for each one of the mountains.

“All things have a name to answer to,” the elders said. “The whole of the earth respects a name. Even the mountains will bow or move if you know their names.”

The village rested in the shadow of the largest and tallest of these mountains, the name of which was the Staryy Korol. It was said the mountain’s shadow was so dark that when it fell upon the village it was as if a darkness deeper than night descended and even the brightest candle could not wink in it.

It was under and in that shadow Aleksander Kirillovich was born, the son of Kirill Vasilyevich and Baghra Vladimirova. There were no family names in the village, for everyone was family through one marriage or another, so a child was known by their given name and patronymic.

And as is often observed in remote places, spirit and flesh and nature all blend into one.

So as was the custom the child was baptized and dedicated to the Saints in the little wooden church with an onion roof that was once red and green but now mostly a beaten brown and three iron bells, a large one that bellowed, a medium one that sang, and a small one that sighed.

Then he was brought outside and laid before the foot of the mountain while the village stood about him in a semi-circle, singing an old song that was more phonetic echoes of words than any coherent speech.

“Saints and the earth will bring you close to heaven,” the old Apparat said. “For saints are supported by the earth which is enriched by the heavens. Serve them and heaven will flow down to you.”

“He will need it,” whispered those in the village, softly to keep the pretense of secrecy but there are no secrets in little villages.

There was talk from the beginning that the child would be a trouble and a sorrow, all children born in the hours when Staryy Korol’s shadow was cast over the village were so.

Some said that a child born in darkness could never truly comprehend light, others said the darkness was so thick that the child’s first breaths inhaled it and it stuck to their souls like tar forever.

Whatever the reason, it was tradition that these “darkling” children were not cursed so to say but a pet of ill-fortune and disaster, and in a little village tradition is worth more than fact. Fact is meat, but tradition is the flavor.

But Aleksander Kirillovich seemed destined to escape such a destiny.

From the earliest age he was known for being cleverer than his age allowed. He spoke and walked sooner than any other child in memory and as soon as he managed these his reputation for using his words and limbs to gain his way in life was renown. 

His parents were hardened, stern folk, born and bred by harsh winters and shallow harvests, but even they found themselves strung along by their sons quick mind and quicker feet.

There were those who said he was swift like a fox, some claimed bright like a raven, and still others cunning like a snake.

One of the oldest in the village, Baba Ludmila said, “You are all wrong. The boy is a wolf. He will always have a pack to follow him and do his work for him. He will always be the hunter and never the hunted, nor ever a scavenger or thief. He will not crawl on his belly or eat the dust of the earth. You will see, this darkling is a ruler.” 

Most in the village scoffed at this; Anatevka produced farmers and herders and woodsmen, not rulers.

Aleksander was too young to care or know of rulers or workers, he had friends and wooden toys and a wilderness to entertain him. Eight winters and summers passed, both seasons similar to one another in their stark desolation, one simply a bright white barrenness and the other a pale gold one.

Aleksander took note of nothing except that in winter his play was cut short by the early darkness, which he did not understand. He saw very well in the dark, his eyes glowed like a cat’s, and he sometimes stared at their gleaming reflection in the little mirror his mother kept on the shrine besides the illuminated icon of Sankta Alina.

“If you look for too long, the other side will see you,” his father warned him once. 

But Aleksander reasoned that with a Saint standing guard besides the mirror, the other side would stay in it’s place. After all, that was what Sankta Alina was the saint of, the banishment of fear.

Or one of the many things she was saint of; the Apparat had the children of the village memorize them all but hers was so long they learned it only in pieces.

Perhaps his father had been right. Or perhaps he had dodged the shadow of the mountain for too long. Later he considered that perhaps he had thought he could wriggle out of it’s grasp like he did out of scoldings and punishments. 

But Staryy Korol and its shadow were old, old as the pillars of the earth; it knew all the tricks in the world, how much more the tricks of a child?

 

*

 

Staryy Korol must have had a sense of irony, for it was a particularly sunny day when it finally decided to lay its claim.

Aleksander had slunk away from his chores and gone to join his playmates outside of the village to continue a game of war they had been forced to leave off the day before when their mothers called them in. 

Aleksander was the general of the Ravkans, as always this was never contested though the role of his second-in-command often caused more conflict than the game itself if Aleksander did not think it worth the trouble to step in and mediate.

Today the transfer of power went smoothly and the game commenced.

They had only played a little while before parents, realizing their children were not out feeding the chickens or sweeping the floors as they ought, began to appear and drag off their children one by one, some with just a look, some with slaps, and some dragging them by the collar or arm.

After an hour the only children left were Aleksander himself and a girl around his age, Annika. The village was small enough that girls and boys played the same games and there were no complaints about it; in Anatevka everyone worked and played the same way since there was so much and so little of each to go around.

Since it was just the two of them, the game of Ravkans versus Fjerdans had to be abandoned since that never worked with less than four people, so they began the game of otkazat'sya versus oprichniki.

Aleksander let Annika play the oprichniki since he wasn’t in the mood to argue over who got to play the tsar’s elite guards. Annika was a bright and spirited girl, she could put up a good fight with her words and her fists if the moment called for it.

Aleksander liked that about her very much; it became dull sometimes bossing the other boys and girls around. It was enjoyable to have a partner in crime who could keep up.

Annika was chasing after Aleksander, the wretched otkazat'sya thief who she, the fearsome oprichniki, would drag beaten and weeping before the throne of the merciless tsar.

It look some imagining, since Annika was dressed in a dirty sky-blue dress as opposed to the oprichniki’s black keftas (at least that’s what the rumors said they wore, no one in the village had seen a real oprichniki in generations). But in a dress and barefoot, she still was overtaking Aleksander for most of their game.

After she had “caught” him for the fourth time, Annika rolled her eyes. “For somebody so well fed you are so _slow!_ ”

“That’s why I’m so slow,” Aleksander said defensively, standing up and brushing the dirt off his clothes. He didn’t like getting dirty, even in play. “If I skipped as many meals as you, I would have less fat slowing me down.” 

Annika’s nose wrinkled in a frown. “Eating more makes you _faster_ , because you don’t tire out so quickly. What is your papa teaching you, boy? Isn’t he a healer, you should know that!”

Aleksander shrugged to hide the embarrassed flush rising in his cheeks. “He doesn’t take me with him to see his work.”

Kirill had promised when he was older he could accompany him, but he had heard his parents argue over it sometimes when they thought he was asleep. There were many strange gaps in their conversations, more so than even most adult exchanges, especially when they spoke about his future.

All he could gather was Baghra didn’t want him to be a healer, she wanted him to study numbers and become something grand like a merchant or accountant, neither of which Alexander was certain were, there were certainly none in Anatevka. All he could gather is he would have to leave Anatevka to become one.

Kirill was very against this. He did not seem particularly passionate about Aleksander following his steps as a healer; his own father had been a woodcutter, so he had no ties to a traditional familial occupation. But he clearly did _not_ want Aleksander to leave Anatevka.

Aleksander was too young to have emotions either way, he could barely imagine life beyond the next day, much less beyond the borders of Anatevka. 

“My papa used to take me with him to the shop,” Annika’s voice brought Aleksander out of his thoughts. “Back when mama was alive and after Sylvi was born, I helped him.”

Annika’s father was the village butcher, or rather he had been. His wife had died last spring, a sickly, soft-spoken woman who had sometimes cared for Aleksander and some of the other children in the village when both their parents were helping with the harvest. 

Kirill had attended her when she fell ill and though he was famous in Anatevka for having “a saint’s touch” with the sick and injured, he could do nothing for her. She fell ill and died all within the space for four days; as sudden as a candle being blown out she was gone. 

After her death, her husband and Annika’s father, had taken to the bottle and apparently a drunkard with a butcher knife was not very effective. He had for no reason Aleksander could understand decided to blame Kirill for his wife’s death, calling him a “witch” who had "poisoned her blood" which caused her to perish. As far as Aleksander could see, the only curses he had garnered he had conjured for himself.

Since then Annika’s family had fallen into poverty even by Anatevka’s standards; Aleksander had seen many of the village women taking it upon themselves to take turns caring for her sister Sylvi, who was still a little child, and making clothes for her and Annika to wear. 

This didn’t sit well with Annika’s father, who Aleksander had heard drunkenly ranting in the streets about not “needing charity”. He had even seen him cuff Annika’s ears for coming home in a newly sewn dress. Annika never cried or even flinched when he did it, and her father was the one who would end up weeping. He never had her return the dresses either.

Aleksander tried avoid the man whenever he could, which was a feat given how small the village was. It wasn’t even that he was very afraid of him, the man was often so drunk he could barely walk home much less cause him harm.

What truly unnerved him was seeing a man he had known all his life to be a simple honest worker who used to carry his laughing daughters on his shoulders, degrade into a hulking drunken beast who roared and stuck at his own children.

“People are not like the rest of this world, Sasha,” his father had told him once. “Most things in this world are born as one thing and set in their place forever. But a man can be many things in one lifetime. A beast cannot become a man, but a man can become a beast.”

“I’m bored of this game,” Annika said abruptly, putting her hands on her hips and blowing at a curl of her hair that had fallen in her face. “You’re too easy to catch.”  

“Let’s play Grisha then,” Aleksander said.

“Noooo, that game is just waving your arms around pretending you have powers. It’s boring.”

Aleksander sighed exasperatedly. “Then what do you want to play? There isn’t--”

“ _Annika!_ ” At bellowing voice of her father Aleksander saw Annika stiffen, her hands clutching the skirt of her dress until they were white.

Aleksander turned and saw him trudging towards them, the blazing and bloodied sunset behind him casting him as a black shadow approaching. His gait was uneven and unsteady and his body swayed precariously from side to side. Aleksander smelled the kvas reeking from him before he was even in arm’s length.

“Where’s Sylvi?” He demanded but his voice was so slurred Aleksander barely understood his question.

“With Baba Ludmila,” Annika said, her face an emotionless mask.

“Do you know how late it is? You should have brought her home already!” He grabbed Annika by her arm and jerked her so hard she nearly fell over. “By the time we get back to the village it will be dark. There won’t be enough light to cook anything for dinner.”

“There isn’t even anything to cook,” Annika mumbled, her eyes locked ahead, avoiding her father’s gaze. 

Her father gave her such a shake that Aleksander thought she would break in pieces. He felt his chest beginning to contract and he wanted to slink away to hide, but couldn’t move without the man noticing him. And he was suddenly afraid to be seen.

“I don’t want to hear disrespect from you, girl!” Annika’s father snarled. “If I had spoken that way to my father he would have beaten me till I couldn’t move, much less talk back!”

“Then why don’t you instead of just shouting about it?” Annika spat, turning to look at her father’s face with flashing, defiant eyes. Aleksander felt the blood drain from his face in horror at her words.

Her father stared at her for a moment with glassy eyes as if he had not comprehended what she said. Then his other hand came around, balled in a fist, and collided with her ear. Her head snapped to the side like a doll’s and for a split second Aleksander’s heart stopped and his stomach leapt into his mouth, thinking it would break off.

But instead Annika lifted her head and glared at her father. Aleksander saw blood trailing down her chin and realized she must have bitten her bottom lip to keep from crying out.

The father and daughter glowered at one another, the air between them charged like the air before a lightning strike, and Aleksander felt the panic in his chest expanding into a terrible certainty: if he did nothing this man _would_ hurt Annika.

“I can fetch a candle from my house, you can use that to light up your home for dinner,” Aleksander said, his voice lowered than he intended, the tension seemed to squash it.

Annika’s father started as if he had just realized Aleksander was there and Annika glanced at him with wide eyes, blaring a silent warning: _Don’t._

“We don’t need your candles,” her father growled.

“You can never have too many candle, my mama says,” Aleksander muttered, fumbling for an offer that would be acceptable. “They’re a gift, for Annika.”

Annika’s father, still gripping his daughter’s arm, stepped towards Aleksander and leaned down so his face was more level with the boy’s. The kvass on his breath almost made Aleksander gage and in the smoldering light of the sunset the man’s face had a hellish glow to it.

“Annika does not need your gifts, darkling. Your gifts and those of your witch parents can only bring ruin.”

“My papa _isn’t_ a witch.” Aleksander had no idea what possessed him to say anything in response to this man, perhaps it was just the natural inclination of a son to defend his father.

“He put a curse on my wife, she would have recovered had he not come and out his hands on her!” the man shouted but his voice was wavering as if he were about to weep.

Aleksander took that as a sign of the man’s aggression weakening and that gave him a fresh sense of courage to snap back: “My papa has cured many people in the village, your wife was just beyond saving!”

“That man killed my wife, he poisoned her blood!” The man all but shrieked, thrashing his head back and forth as if he were trying to toss Aleksander’s words out of his ears.  

“If anyone killed your wife I’d think it was you and your brutish ways!” Aleksander shouted. There was a rushing in his ears like a swarm of bees and his hands had balled into fists, his whole body seemed to buzz with a strange kind of excitement.

The panicking pressure in his chest seemed to have reversed, it now was a defiant force pressing outward, and he felt like he could knock this pathetic drunk down with one blow of his hand. In fact, his hands were feeling oddly achy, as if the rush of strength inside him wanted to burst out through them.

“Sasha stop!” Annika cried, her face pale with panic. Aleksander glanced at her, the heat of the moment flagging, and that was why he didn’t see her father’s fist sailing for his head.

Pain exploded around Aleksander’s ear and he felt his back collide with the hard earth, the dusky sky spinning over his head. He lay still, stunned, white stars like those in Sankta Alina’s crown flashing before his eyes.

He heard voices rising in hysteria, one shrill and the other rumbling, like a bird and a wolf arguing. It took him a second to realize it was Annika and her father. He reached to touch his ear and it felt hot and tender to the touch.

 _He hit me. That drunk fool hit me._  

Aleksander felt a flood of sudden strength thundering through him and he was on his feet, he didn’t even feel his body moving to rise it was as if he were simply propelled to his feet by sheer force of will. 

He was angry but it was like no anger he felt before, none of the blind heaving heat of frustration or rage. This was a cold fury, like the teeth of the winter wind, as hard as Staryy Korol’s icebound peak and as unclouded a night without the moon or stars.

He saw Annika’s back was turned to him and she was facing her father, her arms flailing up and down like a distressed bird, her voice a scramble of incoherent shrieking.  

Her father standing with his shoulders hunched over, his hands gripping his hair as if that was the only thing keeping it on his neck, and his face was blotched and swollen with drunkenness and emotion.

There were tears running down his cheeks and his mouth was gaping open and shut as if he were trying to speak but all that came out was choked by sobs. 

The sound of those sobs provoked a strange, sickening feeling in Aleksander, coiling and twisting in his gut. 

_Disgust._

This man was such a weak, slobbering waste that he couldn’t even manage to get his sins right; first he was a cruel tyrant then he was a weeping weakling. Rabid animals had more consistency in their actions than him.

_A beast cannot become a man, but a man can become a beast._

Aleksander felt the coldness in him congealing in his hands and he had one motive in his mind, as clear and pristine as a winter night: he wanted to _crush_ this man.

He didn’t realize he was even moving until he saw Annika turn, her face and eyes flushed with tears. He marched towards her father, his right arm lifting seemingly of it’s own volition. Annika’s father stared at him with empty, glazed eyes and Aleksander felt a sharp edge of pure hate pressing against his heart like the blade of a knife.

“I’m going to kill you, you drunk bastard,” Aleksander declared and his voice was so stony it could have been cut right out of Staryy Korol.

His right arm lifted and Annika’s father stared at him dumbly, unmoving, and in the very back of Aleksander’s mind he wondered if the animal’s this man had slaughtered had the same expression when he butchered them.

He saw of a flash of something blue darting in front of his vision but just then his arm came down like an axe on a chopping block.

Suddenly felt all the terrible frigid wrath in his surge from every corner of his being down into his arm and through his right hand.

It was like having his soul wound out of him through the eye of a needle; all that had been so clear before now suddenly vanished, and left a massive emptiness through his whole being.

In the same blink of an eye it took for him to take this all in he felt himself being filled up once again, poured over and overflowed. But this time he could see what was filling him up.

Blackness.

Nothingness.

And then he was nothing and he knew nothing.

 

*

 

_Aleksander saw Annika standing, her soft sky blue dress fluttering around her ankles like the ripples of a river. Then she was lying down on the ground with her dress ripped in the middle, a thin neat slice like a string around her middle. Now it was all red like a harvest sunset and the grass around her was a matching color, spreading slowly out from her like a creeping halo._

_He saw Annika’s father bent over on all fours like a dog by her side, his mouth a massive gaping cavern like he was howling but there was no sound. His face was red too but his eyes were opaque like fog._

_Aleksander then saw his hands outstretched before him like he had been reaching out towards something and they were so pale, like the purest fallen snow. But all around them was blackness, a kind so dark there was no texture or depth to it, just a yawning hollow void like all life and light and spirit had been blotted out._

_It was flooding out of his pale fingertips like a flow of blood._

 

_*_

 

Aleksander woke feeling like he was suspended in a pool of utter darkness. There was no light anywhere, not even the slightest glow of it to produce a shadow or silhouette of anything around him. 

He somehow knew his eyes were open, not because he _felt_ them open but because he knew that even in the darkness behind his eyelids there were colors and shapes.

He thought he should feel frightened but the darkness seemed to be closed around him like a fist, all he could perceive was it’s grip, somehow intangible and yet so palpable, surrounding and suffusing him.

When voices suddenly rose from somewhere in the darkness they acted like a match striking, it brought some element to focus his mind on and though at first they sounded distant and mummering as if he were under water, very slowly he was able to make out the words being exchanged.

His father Kirill was speaking, his voice scratchy sounding the way it did when he had been up very late working.

“I put the girl back together, there’s not even a scratch on her much less…”

Kirill trailed off for a moment then continued tightly, “But the father still swears on all the saints on what he saw.”

“No one else was there, Kirill.” That was Baghra’s voice. His mother’s voice sounded less work but drawn tighter, like she was depending on it to hold her entire being together. “And he was rough with her, everyone knew that. They’ll believe it was him, they will--”

“For how long?” Kirill demanded in a hiss, like it cut him to speak the words. “They will find out soon.”

“They did not find out about us.”

“This is greater than ours. There’s _more_ too it, you _know_ it. Don’t you feel it, pulsing out of him, calling to yours?”

Kirill’s voice held something in it; a fearful kind of reverence, like when the people spoke of the judgment of saints, all wonder and terror.

Baghra was silent for an eerie moment before whispering, “We can control it. We have all this time.”

“No, Baghra. They suspected us long ago, but they ignored it. _This_...no one will be able to ignore this.”

At that moment Aleksander felt a lance of pain spear through his temple. He couldn’t suppress a whimper and immediately the voices hushed.

He heard footsteps approaching and felt a warm breath fanning his face. He squinted but could not see anything, the blackness seemed to press against his very eyeballs.

“Sasha, can you hear me?” Kirill’s voice was low, as if he were afraid to unsettle the darkness.

Aleksander tried to speak but couldn’t seem to find his voice, his throat was constricted and his tongue felt heavy.

“Sasha?” Kirill repeated, more urgently.

Aleksander finally coughed and then managed produce a hoarse: “Yes.”

He heard Kirill release a long exhale and Baghra inhale sharply. For some reason Aleksander’s sluggish mind thought, _They should thank the Saints._

But neither did.

“Do you feel any pain?” Baghra said, her voice close but her face entirely unseen.

“No.” He didn’t feel anything, actually. It was as if he were floating just beneath the surface of his skin and bones, drifting just out of the reach of his nerves. “My head...it hurt a little.”

“Where?” Kirill and Baghra asked at the same time.

Aleksander tried to lift his arm to indicate but he couldn’t seem to _find_ his arm. “It doesn’t hurt anymore. And Papa…”

“What?”

“I cannot see you.”

There was a strange pause, then Kirill said, “Sasha, tell me, do you remember what happened…”

Kirill hesitated and Baghra’s voice finished for him: “When you were playing with Annika. What do you remember about what happened?”

_Blue dress, red dress, white hands, black hands…_

Pain bit into his forehead but he forced the words past it: “Her dress...I think I ripped it. Her papa, he was screaming at me. I don’t know why, maybe because I ruined her dress? And my hands, it was like they were bleeding but my blood was dark, like tar.”

The image of the blackness pouring from his hands seemed to awaken a spark deep within him and suddenly he _felt_ his body again--from the flesh to the bone marrow from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet--like every inch was being lit up like a wick.  

He began to gasp and shudder uncontrollably like a hooked fish yanked out of a stream or like a newborn creature bursting out of its mother’s womb.

He felt his father’s firm hands taking hold of his shoulders and there was a sense like his blood was being stirred in a slow, soothing fashion. Alekadner’s body loosened and then became limp, he felt himself sinking into the goose-feather mattress.

“Shhhh Sasha,” Kirill said and then whispered under his breath, “Baghra get him milk.”

Aleksander listened to his mother’s footsteps retreat into the kitchen and then return.

“Your mother has milk, Sasha.”

Aleksander tried to move, but now his body felt heavy like it was full of sand. “I can’t move, Papa.”

There was a tense pause, then his father lifted him up carefully and he felt the rim of a cup put to his lips. The milk was hard to swallow for some reason, it was like the blackness around him was pressing on even his insides. He could only drink half the cup.

“Drink more,” Baghra said.

“I can’t. It hurts.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Kirill said quickly, lowering Aleksander back down on the bed. “Is that all you remember? About Annika?”

“Yes.”

His parents were silent for a long time, then he felt Kirill place his hand on his forehead, running his thumb tenderly over his temple. Whenever his father’s finger touched his skin Aleksander felt his heart slowing, timing itself to its rhythm. His breathing became very deep and steady and he felt profoundly sleepy.

“You rest, Sasha,” Kirill said gently. “Rest now.”

When his hand began to pull away Aleksander’s hand somehow managed to lift up and grab hold of it. His father’s hand felt so large and strong, his own felt as weak and light as a feather.

“Papa, where are you going?”

“I need to go out and work, Sasha. I’ll be back soon.”

Aleksander always had an uncanny instinct for lies; Kirill was lying. But he couldn’t seem to summon the strength to keep hold of his father’s hand as it slipped out of his. He heard his heavy boots marching across the house, the door creaking open and then shutting firmly.

Aleksander heard the creaking of Baghra lowering herself in her chair and the clicking of her spinning wheel starting up.

He felt exhaustion creeping over him and the blackness seemed to be dragging him down into sleep. But something was scratching at the edges of his fading mind.  

“Mama?” He whispered.

“Yes?”

“Why can’t I see you?”

There were several soft whirls of her wheel before she replied: “Staryy Korol’s shadow is over us.”

“Where are the candles?”

“Its shadow is too great. Go back to sleep.”

“Why is Papa going out to work if it is so dark?” 

“Stop asking so many questions, boy. Rest, like your father told you.”

Aleksander wanted to protest but the heaviness in his head finally dragged him back to unconsciousness.

 

*

 

Aleksander woke again more than once, but each time it was still dark and his head still ached, and he would fall back asleep very quickly.

Sometimes Kirill was sitting by his side, sometimes Baghra, and they would have him drink sips of milk and light broths before letting him faint away again.

They didn’t ask anymore questions except if he felt any pain; when he would say his head hurt his father would massage his temple’s with his fingers and all the tension coiled in them would vanish.

Often just as he was waking from or fading back into sleep, he heard his parents speakings but their voices were vague and warped and later he forgot what he thought he had heard.

Except for once.

He could have been lying in bed for a few hours or a few days, the darkness made it all the same. But just as he was falling back into the inky well of exhaustion he heard his father’s voice cut through the deliriousness like a glinting blade:   

“ _That heretic will not take my son._ ”

 

*

 

Finally Aleksander awoke and his eyes opened to see sunlight beaming through the curtains.

He turned his head from side to side and it no longer felt heavy like a stone. He tried wriggling his fingers and toes and they listened to him this time. His breathing was coming easy and he no longer felt pressed on all sides by some invisible force.

He caught sight of his mother sitting at the end of the bed, hands clutched in her lap, staring at him with hollow eyes. She had a kerchief over her hair, a shawl pinned around her shoulders over Papa’s thick winter coat.

“Mama?” His voice was hoarse as if out of practice.

Baghra’s eyes snapped up towards his face. She rose, her black skirt falling stiffly around her, and went to the table were a pitcher stood and a wooden cup. She poured the contents of the pitcher into the cup and brought it to him.  

“Why are you all dressed in black?” Aleksander asked. He noticed he was still dresses in the clothes he had when he was out playing with Annika.

_Annika…_

Images, disarrayed like dust kicked up by a breeze, wavered in front of his eyes.

_Blue dress, red dress, white hands, black hands..._

“Can you sit up?” Baghra’s voice sent the images scattered like a flock of birds. He tried to call them back to his mind but they were gone, like a candle blown out.

Aleksander frowned but did as she requested. His body felt weak and he noticed his stomach was twisted with pain. “I’m hungry, Mama.”

“Drink this,” she said, shoved the cup to his lips. It was goat’s milk and it went down very soft and sweet down his throat. Before he could ask for more she went over and got the pitcher and kept refilling his cup until the pitcher was emptied. His stomach felt a little better then.

The milk made him feel more awake and he asked, “How long have I been asleep?”

“Do you think you can stand up?” Baghra said.

Aleksander stared at her for a moment, confused by the question, before throwing his legs over the edge of his bed. When he put his weight on them they wobbled a bit but he could support himself.

He now glanced around the house and noticed suddenly that it was...empty. The few and simple decorations they had--the bright red, green and blue curtains on the windows, the stark white tablecloth with edges embroidered with flowers, the shrine with all the illuminated icons--were gone.

“Mama, where is everything?”

Aleksander now noticed two bundles on the floor next to the foot of the bed she where she had been sitting. She bent and lifted up the smaller one, holding it out to him.

“Take this.”

When Aleksander stared at her in confusion she shoved it into his arms. She then picked up the bundle left at her own feet and took him by arm, guiding him towards the door.

She stopped to take his own little winter coat she had sewn him this last winter off the peg it hung by the door. She pulled it on him roughly, she buttoned it so hurriedly that she missed the very first button but when he tried to fix it she slapped his hands away.

“What are--”

“Quiet.” Baghra was so sharp and harsh Aleksander’s mouth closed around his protest.

Baghra shoved the door open and dragged him outside. Aleksander saw now it was early dawn, the sun was just cresting over the open horizon, casting the world in a pale pink light. A soft mist hung at the heels of everything and gave the world a distorted, dreamy feel. It made him wonder for a split second if he was still asleep.

Baghra shut the door behind them and pulled him down the stairs after her, he almost tripped on the last rickety one. Her fingers were digging so deeply into his arm he thought she meant to snap it off, and yet somehow the pressure also seemed to keep all his questions bottled up in his throat.

Their little house was situated close to the edge of town so they only had to pass by two houses to be outside of it’s borders. It was so early even the chickens had not woken so there should have been no one out at this hour.

But as they were circling round the last house, Baghra’s at such a speed Aleksander almost had to run to keep up with her, they nearly rammed right into Ekaterina Ivanova, a pregnant newlywed. Aleksander remembered attending her wedding and dancing with his father. For some reason with that memory the thought finally stuck him:

_Where is Papa?_

But before he could pose this question to Baghra he caught sight of Ekaterina’s face; it was suddenly bloodless and wide-eyed.

For a split second an image flashed across Aleksander’s mind--the image of little Annika’s face the color of milk and her eyes as open and empty as a winter sky, a long thin line of red across her center like string that with one pull would unravel her...

“ _Grisha_.” 

Aleksander blinked, the image gone, and Ekaterina's face appeared again. Her hand was outstretched, her pinkie and index finger extended, the sign Aleksander recognized as a ward against evil and curses.

 

“ _Grisha_ ,” Ekaterina breathed again.

Aleksander stared at her in utter bafflement but the quaver in her voice and the gaping horror in her eyes, focused solely on him, made his stomach wrench.

Baghra yanked his arm so violently he almost fell flat on his face but her grip on his arm kept him from actually falling, but he tripped and stumbled over his feet three times before he regained his footing.

By the time he was able to look up at his surroundings they were out of Anatevka and walking through the fields that in summer would be filled with golden wheat that soared above his head. But in early spring, the ground was still too hard with leftover iciness from winter to plant anything.

Aleksander’s breaths came out it smoky puffs as he struggled to keep pace with Baghra, clutching the bundle close to his chest. He couldn’t tell what was in it except it was soft but heavy enough that his arms were already aching from holding it so long.

He glanced at Baghra whose face was set like a stone and staring straight ahead, as if it were only by her continued gaze her destination remained in place. He looked in the direction she was staring and saw Staryy Korol rising before them. Its vast base beginning to alight with the morning sun, while it’s summit remained wreathed in shadow and fog.

“Mama where are we going?”

“You will see when we get there.”

Aleksander hated that kind of answer; it always indicated either adults were either trying to deceive him or simply had no justifiable answer. He always wondered why _I don’t know_ was such an anathema for adults to say.

His arm was starting to feel numb in Baghra’s grip. He tried to shift it slightly but she responded by giving him a sharp shake.

“You’re hurting me!”

“Quiet,” she hissed between clenched teeth and her eyes flickered away from Staryy Korol for the first time, her head head tilting only enough to glance quickly over her shoulder.

_What is she looking for?_

It was so early that no one would be wandering in the fields, especially not in this season.

An idea struck him. “Where is Papa? Is he coming?” Aleksander tried to look over his shoulder but again Baghra have him a shake that he was sure was going to dislodge his shoulder from its socket.

“I said be quiet. Stop asking so many questions.”

There was a tension in her voice that silenced Aleksander’s questions. Usually denying his curiosity only inflamed it but something in his mother’s expression instead turned it cold and dead. For the first time in his short life, Aleksander felt _fear_ at the idea of his questions being answered.

They walked so fast for so long Aleksander was almost choking for breath when they finally reached the foot of Staryy Korol.

Baghra stopped to stare up at the mountainside while Aleksander stood, gasping for air. He glanced up at Staryy Korol’s face, stretching so high above him he could not see the top even if he leaned his neck all the way back and so wide that he could not see it’s end even if he squinted either to the left or right.

Perhaps it was the earliness of the day, or the strangeness of the situation, but Staryy Korol whom Aleksander had known and lived under its shadow all his life, appeared monstrous and oppressive, like an ogre from myth.

There was a strange coiling in his chest and he felt his fingers beginning to ache and itch.

_White hands, black hands, blue dress, red dress..._

Baghra took a step towards the mountain but Aleksander pulled back. She yanked at his arm but he dug his heels into the ground.

Baghra finally whirled around, her eyes flashing. “Aleksander, come.”

“No.”

“Aleksander, don’t you dare--”

“I won’t take another step until you tell me where Papa is!” Aleksander screamed, the panic that had been building since seeing Ekaterina’s horror-stricken face finally  bursting forth.

His hands were starting to hurt, like the muscles were being twisted under the skin, and his breath was coming short.

_Blue dress, red dress, white hands, black hands…_

_White hands, black hands, blue dress, red dress..._

For a moment, Baghra looked prepared to strike him and Aleksander braced himself. But instead the ferocity in her expression faltered and he caught something flash across her face, so quick it was like a rabbit darting into it’s burrow.

It was too fast to put a name too but whatever it was it made his chest contract and he suddenly realized he didn’t want to know the answer, he didn’t want to hear--

“He isn’t coming. He’s dead.” The words were flat and cold as the fields and hit Aleksander like cold water in his face.

He stood motionless, staring up at his mother blankly, for the first time in his life not a single thought was in it.

“Dead?” He heard himself say but he didn’t feel his lips forming the words or even really understand what he was saying.

“They hung him while you were asleep.”

“Hung him?”

Baghra stamped her foot and looked away from him as if she could not stomach his question. “Yes, boy, hung.”

“But why?”

Now Baghra looked at him and Aleksander had never seen her look so unfathomably exhausted, not even after coming home in the evenings during harvest time when she had spent all day gathering wheat.

The look in her eyes was like a night sky with no stars, so utterly dark and empty of life and light that it seemed to create a gnawing void that inhaled all the energy and life around it. He felt weak just looking at her.

“Because he killed Annika’s father.”

“Why?”

Aleksander didn’t know why he kept asking questions, he wasn’t even sure how he was asking them, he wasn’t thinking or feeling anything, and yet his mouth kept moving of it’s own volition. He had heard a human head could respond to it’s name being called even after being immediately severed from its body, perhaps it was something like that.

“Because he was going to report you to the oprichnik.” Baghra suddenly knelt down and took him by the shoulders, the expression in her eyes suddenly burning in the cold, searing way of ice. “They were going to take you away from us. They were going to take you to make you into a monster.”

Her fingers dug into his shoulders and her gaze felt as if it meant to burn his eyes out. “He did it to save you, Aleksander, he _killed_ for you. It was better to him to damn his own soul than to see it done to your own. Never forget that. Do you understand?”

He didn’t understand, he understood absolutely nothing, his head was buzzing as if there were a swarm of bees in it. But he nodded and said, “I understand Mama.”

Baghra held onto him for a moment longer, her eyes searching, looking for what he didn’t know. Then she released him abruptly and stood, taking up her bundle which had dropped by her feet.

Aleksander felt himself breathing again, as if he had been holding his breath all this time, but his lungs felt pinched and heavy, every breath was like inhaling thistles.

When Baghra started up the trail that wove like a thread along the side of Staryy Korol, she didn’t grab his arm and she didn’t need to, Aleksander follow her without another word all the rest of the day.

 

*

 

It took them four days to reach their destination. Baghra had only stopped to rest when she noticed Aleksander began to stumble over his own feet and fall more than five paces behind.

She produced a goatskin with water from her bundle that she refilled by a stream that could always be heard whispering to the right hand of the path. She also had some bread and cheese wrapped in a handkerchief in the bundle as well and though Aleksander ate what she offered he didn’t taste it.

He didn’t really feel anything at all these days, when he tripped over a root and fell on his knees, he had simply stood back up and hadn’t noticed his pants and knees were torn and bloodied until Baghra noticed that night around the little fire she made.

Not a word had passed between them since they stood at the foot of Staryy Korol and the air had grown so thin Aleksander thought if he tried to think his words would be too heavy for it and fall to the ground like stones.

This thoughts were growing strange like that, ever since they began the journey. He thought perhaps it was Staryy Korol’s old magic working on him.

Everything seemed to have a life to it, the air, the silence, the trees, the overgrown and stony path under their feet. He felt like an invader in a stranger's home and it seemed better to be silent, either out of politeness or caution, an intruder didn’t draw attention to himself.

When they finally stopped it was at a cottage that seemed to materialize out of the trees themselves. There was moss and vines clinging and bursting from nearly every inch so at first he barely noticed the wood that it was built from, the same dark and strong lumber that stood surrounding it.

The steps leading up to the door were almost hidden by an overgrowth of weeds, which Baghra simply kicked aside as she marched up to the door. She had to shove it open with a blow of her shoulder, the door’s hinges screeching and the bottom of the door scraping across the wood floor.

Baghra coughed and waved the dust that was kicked up the door. She turned to Aleksander and said, “Stay there. It needs to air out.”

She dumped her bundle in front of the door to keep it from closing and then vanished into the house. Aleksander stood in his place, standing and staring at the door, listening to Baghra’s footsteps pace back and forth in the cottage.

When she returned to the doorway her face was flushed and she pulled the kerchief out of her hair, wiping the fabric across her damp brow.

She paused and looked at him, her brow furrowing. “Why didn’t you sit down?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked at him for a moment longer then exhaled heavily. “Come in now.”

Aleksander climber the steps and entered the cottage. The air was thick and pungent with the smell of wood and dust and he stood in the doorway coughing for a long time before he had a chance to look around.

It was small, smaller than their home an Anatevka had even been.

There were only two rooms, a kitchen with a low wooden table with two small chairs and an iron oven making up most of the space. Then there was the bedroom with a single cot pushed against one wall and small fireplace cut into the opposite one. There were four windows in each wall that Baghra had opened and the plain white curtains hanging over each blew limply in the sluggish breeze.

There were no decorations or embellishments, everything was stripped down to the barest minimum for necessity. He thought back to their house Anatevka, with the bright curtains of all colors, the two goose feather mattresses for his bed and his parents, the shrine with all the icons, Baghra’s spinning wheel and Kirill's hunting rifle.

He felt the first pangs of emotion since standing at the foot or Staryy Korol but they were dull and muffled, as if the old air in the cottage were stifling them.

“Take your coat off,” Baghra said even as she knelt to unbutton it and pull it off his shoulders. “Put the bundle down.”

Aleksander let the bundle drop out of his arms onto the floor. Baghra hissed and flinched at the thud it made on the floor.

“Boy, that has all our--” She stopped and looked at his face closely.

When she reached for his face Aleksander thought to pull away but it seemed to be too much energy and he let her take his face in her hands. It was only when she ran her thumbs over his cheekbones he realized he was crying.

“What’s done is done, Aleksander,” she whispered. He swallowed and his throat felt thick and sticky, like the cottage air was leaking into his lungs.

“Mama?”

“What?”

“I killed Annika, didn’t it?” The words were easier to say than he thought they should have been. “That’s why Papa killed him. Because he was going to have them come for me, because I killed his daughter.”

Baghra regarded him for a very long time, the silence wrapping around them like the heavy coils of a noose.

“It saps as much energy to look back and move forward. So at least pick the one that accomplishes something. Don’t look back anymore, Aleksander. Don’t.”

From that day on she always referred to him as that, Aleksander. He thought at first that perhaps it was because without father he had become the man of the house and so was now spoken to like a man.

Later, he thought perhaps it was more like how the folk in Anatevka spoke of Staryy Korol by name. Speaking a true name gave you power and authority over a thing.

Perhaps his mother was trying to control him.

Or the mountain’s shadow within him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story came about after seeing a few alarkling role reversal drabbles on tumblr and sitting up late into the night entertaining a friend on skype by making up this story as I went. I wrote this chapter in less than a week after randomly typing out the opening sequence and then once I started I couldn't seem to stop.
> 
> I have no beta reader (I mean my mom read it and liked and she's cool so that's my biggest recommendation) so apologies in advance for any spelling/grammatical/weird sentence mistakes along the way. Hopefully the story is compelling enough to overcome these shortcomings!
> 
> A few bits of trivia for this chapter:
> 
> Staryy Korol is just a literal English to Russian translation of "High King" I typed into Google translate, hopefully it doesn't sound too ridiculous.
> 
> Anatevka is the name of the village from Fiddler on the Roof, which is probably one of the first films I ever saw as a child and still one of the best I've ever seen.
> 
> Annika is the girl Aleksander befriended in The Demon in the Wood, which I actually have not read since I cannot find it in library or online or anywhere and have no money to spend on ordering it. The reason I never name her father is I'm not sure what her father's name was in the story or if she even had one; I'll give another less pathetic interpretation and say it's an unintentional meta metaphor for the "knowing a thing's name" theme in this entry.


	2. Chapter One

_-But what did you find on the mountaintop?_

_-What all find when their head brushes the heavens while their feet still touch the earth. The law of all things._

_-Which is?_  

 _-That all the striving and suffering of man is stifled by the silence of the heavens and then swallowed up by the earth._  

-“ _The Simple Book: A Discussion of the worth of Religion and Tradition in the Modern Ravkan Age_ ” by Ilya Morozov, while imprisoned in the northern gulag in the thirtieth year of the rule of Tsar Alexander III

                                                                                                *

Alina had taken up drawing and painting as a serious hobby somewhere in the second hundred year of her life.

Before then Ravka had still been a young country, stumbling on shivery legs like a newborn foal, and her focus was consumed with supporting it as took its first steps and nursing it on the milk of miracles and light. 

But towards Ravka’s second century, when the entire land had been gathered under one flag and the petty divisions of clan had finally been ironed out, there had finally been time for the cultivation of culture. 

After all, what was a nation without a sense of self? If sainthood had taught her anything it was that rituals and iconography held no authority if there was not a spirit to inhabit them. A crown did not make a ruler, the ruler created the crown; and a kingdom was not a kingdom until it had a people. And people needed vessels to pour themselves into and symbolize them, like a given name it served to imbue the feeling of identity. 

So Sankta Alina lead the way, as she always did, and began to search for venues to encourage Ravakn culture. Raised and living in a church gave one a predilection for visual art so she had decided to begin there. 

Her education by the first Apparat while far more expansive than she could have imagined as a little girl living in Dva Stolba (Two Mills, that was all the village had to boast of and so that is what it had been named, when it had stood) was focused on the art of religion and politics. She memorized prayers and parables, blessings and curses and she learned to discern design and influence intent; the minds of men had been her canvas, her will had been the brush and her words the paint. 

Finding the proper tutor had been a tiresome task, most were too overcome with adoration to correct or guide her, and Alina was utterly lacking in natural talent when it came to art. But once she had not been naturally inclined to the orchestration of public speaking or to the tactics warfare or the strategy of rulership; she had been a painfully and pathetically normal child, mousy and miserable. 

“I am no saint,” she had blubbered more than once. 

“No you surely are not,” the Apparat had said in his reedy yet somehow arresting voice. “But the blessing of mankind is unique in this world. If you had been born a lizard, I could not teach you to fly as a hawk. But since you are human, with instruction and discipline you may learn anything. It is our greatest advantage above all creatures in this world, to never be compelled to settle for what we were born as. The poor become rich, the sinners become saints, and the craven become courageous.”

The Apparat had been right, as he had been about nearly everything he had taught her since the day he brought her, pale and white-haired, out of the ruins of Dva Stolba and into the first little church. Of course, he did not mention until much later that the same philosophy worked in reverse: rich fell into poverty, saints were blighted by sinners, and courage turned craven. 

When Alina had finally managed to secure a teacher who was willing to truly educate her she had worked tirelessly to gain proficiency, first in drawing and then painting. It took many years, more than even expected as her role as Sankta was still in great demand those days, but she had all the time in the world and if Alina had one inborn trait it was diligence. 

Now four hundred years later, she was considered a master of both arts and today some of her pieces were sold for small fortunes, the money collected and then spent for the needs of the church. 

She felt something of a cheat in this regard, she had more time than any other artist to perfect her technique and her role as Sankta ensured that no matter how wretched a product she produced it would be hailed simply by benefit of her having made it.

She ensured that exactly half of her pieces were given away to the poor; the stories amazed her of how men and women and even children wept at being handed a simple painting of the Ravkan landscape. Some of them barely had enough money for meals and yet rather than sell the piece for the money it would bring, they placed it in their shrine with their icons and candles. 

That did in part move her, that pure and guileless devotion, but there was another part of her that was...troubled, was the only description she could conjure for it. She could not imagine looking into the eyes of her starving child and preferring to endure that sight rather than just sell a mere painting. 

But she wasn’t a mother, she could never be a mother in the literal sense though she was called the Mother of Ravka, and she had not been starving for a very long time, so she supposed she could not judge.

This morning Alina was working on a landscape, a depiction of the vast plains Ravka was famous for with a single black mountain rising out of the golden autumn grass. 

Mountains were not common in Ravka, the land was mostly flat which was why carriages or wagons in the summer and sleighs in the winter were still the most efficient mode of transport. The mountains grew by the borders near Fjerda and Alina had joked sometimes that they were foreign invaders encroaching on Ravka.

She had seen every inch of Ravka at least twice in her lifetime and had found beauty in it all, but the mountains had always carried a strange fascination with her. Once during a campaign in the early years of her reign, her camp had stopped in the shadow of one such mountain called Staryy Korol by the locals.

All the days they were there, she had felt ill at ease and was constantly invoking her power, even ar times when there was no audience to benefit from the showing of it. She had simply felt even in the hours when the sun threw the mountain’s shadow away from her that she was still caught in its shade, there was always a chill seeped under her skin.

Then on their final night camping there, she’d had a strangest and most vivid dream. 

She had dreamt that out of the shadow of Staryy Korol a young man had taken form, one with eyes grey as its stones, skin as white as the snow on its peak, the only blackness in him was his inky hair that fell over his eyes.

He had come into her tent as silently and smoothly as a breath of wind and laid himself besides her on the rich furs and heavy fabrics that made up her bed.

She had been strangely unafraid, in fact she had rolled on her side to face him. Their breathes had mingled, hers warm and his icy, creating a visible cloud between them.

“Who are you?” she had whispered.

“A Darkling,” he had whispered back, his voice cool and flowing like a mountain stream.

“That is _what_ you are. _Who_ are you?”

He had smiled, a smile beautiful in a savage way, like a wolf baring its teeth. “If I told you my name, Sankta Alina, you would rule over me.”

She now had smiled at him, the kind of smile her late husband had once called lush like a fresh fruit. “Perhaps you would like that. Most of Ravka seems to.”

“I am the son of Staryy Korol, my power is as great as yours and runs as deep. I have no need of a ruler, anymore than you do.”

“Then why have you come to me?”

“I haven’t truly. When I do come unto you, you will know me.”

“For what will you come to me for?” 

“For my inheritance, Sol Koroleva,” he whispered and his eyes glinted in the dark like a cat’s. “For your balance. For every evening there is a morning, for every light there is a shadow. You will need me someday.” 

“If I had not needed you all this time, why should I need you later?”

“Because people change, Sankta. The mountain does not, the land that it sprang forth from and the sky that it reaches for does not, and the beasts that live and between them all do not. But the miracle of mankind is that it changes.”

She had reached out and run her fingers lightly over his face, it was all smooth planes and sharp angles like a statue cut from stone.

Her touch did not distract him but seemed to make his focus on her even sharper, more consuming; being in his gaze was like being eaten up.

But perhaps it was her age or her experience or just her nature, but it was not an unpleasant sensation at all. It was a...stimulating one.

“In my experience I've found that mankind never changes,” she said softly. “They want the same things today and they did when I was a child.”

His eyes flickered and to this day the feeling of her heartbeat hitching at the sight was as vivid as when she dreamt it. “People change, Alina. You will see. And that is when I will come to you.”

He had then drawn close and kissed her, she remembered his mouth tasted sweet like fresh river water; it reminded her of the water the Two Mills had churned in in her childhood.

His kiss had tingled and filled her lungs like sharp mountain air and it provoked the heat in her, it sprung to life and licked through her as if to drive out his coldness. When he pulled away from her she felt fiery all over and his lips and cheeks were suddenly flushed, as if he had inhaled a spark of her fire.

“I will see you then, my Alina.”

And then he had melted away into the darkness and she had woken, heart pounding and short of breath, her body covered in a thin sheen of sweat. She had shivered all the rest of the day, though she had never fallen ill a day in her life since she first summoned light.

She had been glad when they left Starry Korol behind.

“Sankta?”

Alina started, her paintbrush jerking across the canvas and leaving a dark smear across the sky. She sighed deeply and turned to see the Apparat bowing before her.

Alina wasn’t sure if it was her age or her nature but she was in the habit of fading into her memories for hours at a time. She shook her head slightly to clear it. 

“Yes?”

“The Chancellor is here to speak with you.”  

“Ah yes. Send him in.” She had forgotten entirely this was on the schedule for today.

The Apparat bowed and went to open the door for the man while Alina laid her brush down and took one of the rags lying around her painting area to wipe her fingers.

The Chancellor entered, a dandy-dressed little man with face, eyes and hair so pale they seemed to blend together and whose name she never seemed to recall, entered and approached her, bowing dramatically before her.

She held out her right hand to be kissed, taking note of his slight hesitation when he saw she had been painting.

 _No one will notice an extra spot of color on that peacock’s outfit you have on_ , she thought but didn’t bother saying. Some days and with people sarcasm just wasn’t worth the effort.

“Merciful Sankta,” the man began in theatrical, sanctimonious voice and Alina could already sense she was going to have to keep this meeting short if she hoped to keep a good mood for the rest of the day. “I assume you read my report.”

“I read many reports daily, quite a few by your hand, so please elaborate,” she said dryly, picking up her paintbrush again and setting to work fixing the smear his announcement had caused.

“It was on the subject of the heretic Illya Morozova.”

“Ahh,” Alina said. “ _A Simple Book._ ”

“Yes, it is a tirade of the worst--”

“I read it. I was impressed with his language. Very reasonable and personable, it was like he was sitting in my drawing room speaking to me.”

The Chancellor looked flabbergasted and his mouth flapped open and close like a fish. “It-it was treasonous, Sankta.”

“Well _that_ was obvious.”

“Tsar Alexander--may he prove to rule beside you faithfully--is deeply concerned by the apostate nature of this man’s work.”

“That’s reasonable.”

The Chancellor was obviously trying to repress frustration at her unreactive manner. “He believes something must be done about it.” 

“I disagree.”  

“Sankta, the man is a radical!” The Chancellor exclaimed.

A burning glare from Alina turned his face a proper shade of white.

“Then his ideas will burn themselves out,” she said tightly, slowly, never letting her eyes leave his. “I have seen men like him with the same hysterical ramblings come and go throughout the years.

“When I first was anointed there were men like him saying I was a false saint or a figurehead, simply a vessel of the Lantsov’s aggressions and the connivings of the first Apparat. But here I am still and where are they? Forgotten.

“The more we seek to silence him the more it will make his words seem a legitimate threat and our enemies and those who are disgruntled or ungrateful will heed him.”

The Chancellor swallowed before speaking, now his voice a suitably humbled tone, “Your wisdom is unparalleled, Sol Koroleva. But...what I mean to say is Tsar Alexander has known no peace since this man has surfaced and believes he and his heirs will not be safe unless the man is apprehended.”

Alina had been in enough of these sort of meetings to know when her opinion was solicited as a formality. It had offended her at times in the past but when you had outlived those who had disrespected you a hundred times over and the years had proven you correct as many times, there seemed little point in the effort it took to take offense.

So Alina shrugged and picked up her brush again.

“I see Alexander will not be taking my good counsel to heart,” she said. Yes offense neededt be taken but the pleasure of having the last word never did seem to wear thin. “Tell the Tsar if it is his desire to banish the man or cast him into a labor camp, then tell him I say, “Is this not your kingdom? Are you not Tsar? Did I not put your fathers on this throne? If the wisdom I gave unto them to gain it is not good enough for you to keep it, then by all means do as you see fit.”” 

The Chancellor looked ready to open his mouth, most likely to try to convince her not to take Alexander’s actions that way, which Alina thought she would be offended if he thought whatever paltry words his young brain could produce could deceive _her_. But the Apparat spared her by shooing him out, tutting, “Sankta has spoken.”  

Alina had already turned back to her painting, absorbed in blending the soft pastel colors of the dawn on her canvas. The man’s concerns were already fading from her mind, released to the flow of time that had washed so many men like him and their petty problems out of her existence.

To live a long life sanely is to learn the art of forgetting as astutely as the art of remembrance.

_That would make a wonderful proverb._

Just as she opened her mouth to call the Apparat, she realized she had already spoken that one some time before and it was now a well-known proverb.

Perhaps she needed to turn more energy towards remembering these days. It was just so much more of a burden to hold onto things than to let them go. Taking an eternal life day by day was like putting pebble in your pocket every day, soon enough it began to weigh you down.  

Alina sighed and dunked her paintbrush in the water, watching pensively as the paint discolor and darken the water. 

                                                                                            *

The next day she was informed Alexander had arrested Morozova and was running him through a show trial to be sent to a southern gulag.

She was coloring in the shadowy mountain on her canvas when she found out. She sighed heavily. 

_I was too hands-off with this one. I shall have to put more work into his heir._

She paused in her work to massage her right hand which was cramping from holding the brush. She glanced at the mountain she had painted and suppressed as shiver. She didn’t know why she had chosen to paint this, now that she thought of it.

 _Too late to change course now_ , she thought and picked up the brush again.

                                                                                              *

In the first year on Staryy Korol, Baghra sometimes went down the mountain several times and came back with necessities: seeds to grow vegetables, some chickens and ducks and geese for eggs and special dinners, two goats for milking, cloth for sewing clothes, and ammunition for the musket. 

Aleksander had wondered why she hadn’t brought Kirill’s gun with them. It had been such a lovely musket, hand-made by Kirill’s own grandfather, the dark wooden body adorned with ivory and silver embellishments and carved with curling and swirling shapes that Alekander recalled tracing with his fingers as a very young child.

Every week Kirill had sat down to clean it until gleamed like a polished gemstone, and from the time Aleksander was five he had been allowed to hold it for a few moments afterwards. It was so heavy in his arms that he could barely stand up but the sense of surety and power it gave was immeasurable. He had been promised to be taught and taken hunting with it once he was old enough.

When he brought up the subject, Baghra was sitting by the fireplace, sewing up a new shirt for him out of a thicker cloth to insulate him against the thin air of the mountainside.

The fire cast her face in an alternately stark and shadowy contrast, it always fascinated him how the bright the light the darker the shadow it produced; there seemed to be some profound, poetic purpose in that he could not comprehend. The Apparat in Anatevka has said that all things in life were interwoven like threads of a tapestry, even the smallest ant was somehow bound to the very turning of the earth.

Aleksander was lying on the narrow cot, the warm light of the fire and the woody scent of the cottage already lulling him into a languid state. Perhaps that was why he did not think about the wisdom of his question.

“Mama,” he said drowsily. “Papa’s musket was so much finer and better than this one. Why did you not bring it with us?” 

Baghra’s fingers had halted in their ministrations and though the fire sent darkness flittering across her face, obscuring its expression, Aleksander still felt the tension bleeding out of her like his words had cut a vein. 

Like he had cut through Annika. 

Baghra turned to him, effectively facing away from the fire so her face was entirely swallowed by shadow. Her voice, when it finally came, was frigid, “We don’t need any reminders of the past. We were better served by the money it brought us than by the memories it would have given.” 

Aleksander had felt a sudden plunging sense of grief, as if he had been dunked into a pool of it so deep it closed over his head. He had turned over and faced the wood wall, not wanting Baghra to him crying like a little child over something as inconsequential as an old musket.

And it was foolish to so suddenly be struck and distraught by the idea that he would never learn to shoot with it, after he had lived with the causal certainty that one day his father would take him out and teach him as his own father had taught him before. 

It was nonsense really, to only now feel the weight and width of his father’s absence, to only now truly realize he was never going to wake up and find his father sitting by the fire smoking his tobacco pipe, watching Aleksander as he woke and leaning over to stroke his head as he had done so many mornings. 

The idea that could walk all over the face of the earth, travel to every corner and cross every ocean, and never once in the vastness of the land, the depth of the sea and the swarm of mankind even catch of _glimpse_ of his father again, in that instant seemed so incomprehensible and yet so undeniable. It crushed him, the savagery in the truth of it, his inability to refute or change it.

_I can kill, but I cannot give life. Where is the sense, the balance in that?_

It was like Kirill had said, the rest of this world was set in stone and followed an order, but mankind was free to make of himself whatever he pleased. And with that freedom, he brought chaos and imbalance to everything else.

 _It would have been better if I had been made a bird, or a stone, or a river. Then I would fly north every winter and south every summer, or I would sit and soak in the sun everyday, or I would flow in the same direction between my riverbanks always. Nothing would change, and nothing would touch me, good or ill. I would just_ **_be_** _, empty of everything, and there would have peace in that nothingness._

That reminded him of the nothingness he had felt after the darkness had taken him at Annika’s death. 

He had shut his eyes and tried to feel if it were still in there, that blessed obliteration, if he could somehow summon it again and throw himself back into the unfeeling, unknowingness. 

But all he saw when he shut his eyes was Annika in her sky-blue dress, with that thin red thread wrapped around her waist. And it made him pull back to the sour, sorrowful state of being.

_If I had died too, would Papa be alive still?_

It seemed such a better outcome, to be in the silent embrace of death, and not have to carry this burden of guilt. 

_If not for me, Annika would still live, her father and my father would still live. Why am I the one to live when I killed all three?_

Once, the Apparat had said all things were built on foundations of threes: the world was made up of sky, earth and sea; the heavens were adorned by the sun, the moon and the stars; life was sustained by water, fire and blood; mankind was continued through father, the mother, and the child.

Were these three bodies the foundation of his life? Was this the foundation his existence would be built upon? What could a life built on the bones of three bodies ever become?

He must have fallen asleep because when he opened his eyes dawn was seeping through the curtains and Baghra was gone, probably to milk the goat.

When he sat up and began mumbling the morning prayers as he was accustomed to, the thought struck him that their icons had probably gone the way of his father’s musket, sold to provide a more “useful” commodity.

Perhaps Baghra was right, there was no room left in his life for anything that made him think too far back or ahead, it took enough effort to dwell on each day.

Saints were the hope of what lay ahead. And Aleksander had none. 

                                                                                            * 

Ten years passed in a numbing, unchanging rhythm. 

In spring and summer the mountainside burst forth in a cacophony of vibrant colors and sounds, every green thing was blooming or seeding and all the living creatures were breeding or birthing. 

In autumn all life began to wind slowly down into hushed whispers; the green withered and fell, creating a rustling carpet underfoot, and the animals began to dart and scurry in and out of holes in the earth and trees, collecting food for the winter days.

Then winter fell like an icy hand and all fell into silence except for the wailing of the wind that swept through.

Daily life followed a similarly fixed routine: Aleksander rose at dawn to feed the few animals, chop wood for the kitchen stove and fireplace, tend to the small vegetable garden and draw water from the well. Some days he went out hunting with the old musket or made and set traps.

No one else ever came up the mountain, which had confused him in the beginning.

“Won’t whoever built the cabin throw us out when they find us here?” he had asked Baghra after they had lived there for around a month.

“My great-grandfather built this cabin. We are the owners.”

“What about hunters?”

“No one comes this far up Staryy Korol to hunt anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because they fear it.” 

 _Shouldn’t we fear then?_ He had thought but didn’t say anything. Instead he asked, “Why didn’t your great-grandfather fear it?”

“Because he was Grisha.”

Aleksander had fallen silent after that. He didn’t want to talk about Grisha, ever.

                                                                                              *

That sentiment remained for many years, but it was eventually overridden by the simple urge to _talk._ The isolation of the mountain was acute and in the first few years Aleksander thought he might go mad from it.  

In the early days he thought he heard voices, weaving through the trees or wafting on the breeze or babbling in the brooks. Sometimes they excited him, he imagined that perhaps one of his friends from Anatevka had come up to visit him; other times it frightened him, perhaps it was the oprichnik coming to take him away. 

The worst moments were when he thought he heard his father’s voice. The mountain liked that trick very much and used it often at the start. When he stopped listening to it’s mimicry of his father’s voice, the other voices vanished as well.

Those days were so steeped in silence he felt it stick to him like sap. It made the world seem to slow to a crawl, his heartbeat came in prolonged, spaces thumps and his breaths in heavy, dragging sighs. Even the noise of the mountain, the nature that clung to its mighty head and shoulders, was a dull buzz in the back of his head. 

The brittle air and sharp sunlight had chapped his lips and peeled his skin at first and he had idly thought he was turning into a piece of the foliage all around him. He wondered if he would fade into the trees or sink into the earth, simply swallowed up by the mountain. It frightened him that the thought did not disturb him. 

So he talked to Baghra, instinctively he sensed hearing another person’s voice would banish these delusions. 

“Are you Grisha, Mama?” he asked her one day, perhaps after their first year on the mountain.

It was midday and Baghra was sitting on the steps of the porch, plucking the feathers off a chicken. Aleksander was leaning on the railing of the porch, his chin resting on his crossed arms. 

“Yes.” Baghra did not seem to share his belief on speaking, he felt if he never spoke to her she would be content to never speak another word again.

“Was Papa Grisha too?” 

“Yes.” 

“Was our whole family Grisha?” 

“No.” 

“Why were you both Grisha then?”

“We shared the same great-grandfather.”

That wasn’t unusual in Anatevka. “What sort of Grisha was Papa?”

“Healer.” 

Well that made sense. “What sort are you?”

"Heartrender."

Aleksander started and shuddered involuntarily. “But...you don’t eat hearts or drink blood.” 

Baghra rolled her eyes. “Because a Heartrender’s power does not come from that. It’s inborn, like all Grisha powers.” 

The stories hadn’t said that’s where they derived their power, just that it enhanced it, but he decided not to quibble over the point.

“Why were you and Papa not taken away to the Little Palace?” Even in Anatevka people knew Grisha were taken away as children and raised under the care of Sankta Alina, brought up as her devoted children in hopes of rising to sainthood themselves.

“The examiner’s never came. Anatevka is too much out of the way.”

“Then why did you and Papa hide?”

Baghra sighed heavily as if his continual questioning were a terrible, undeserved burden. “Because people prefer for everyone to be the same, Aleksander. It makes them feel safe. So we indulged them and in exchange we lived in peace.” 

There was a strange quality to her silence after that sentence and Aleksander’s head involuntarily finished: _Yes, in peace until you came._

A thought struck him and he glanced down at the rails, scratching at the splintering wood with his nails. “Is that why Papa didn’t bring me with him?”

“What?” Baghra turned to look at him for the first time, her brows knit together. “Boy, if you’re going to talk, don’t mumble.” 

“Is that why Papa never brought me with him to visit his patients?” Aleksander said, louder than he needed, out of petty spite at her criticizing his speech. “Because he thought I’d notice he was Grisha?”

There was an almost imperceptible pause, a slight slicker of her eyes as if she were casting out for an answer. “Yes.”

 _Lie_. Or at least partly.

Being lied to soured his desire for conversation so he swung under the rail and went off towards the woods. 

“Keep within earshot!” Baghra called after him. “The mountain eats up the foolish and the incautious.” 

Over the next few years, he had wandered far out of earshot, in that very hope. But the mountain spat him back out every time. 

                                                                                              *

Ten years wore out many things in Aleksander.

The memories of his neighbors’ and his father’s face and voices. The sense of ever being well-slept or going to bed without aching all over. The irrational hopes for company other than his mother. 

But with the wearing came new, honed angles and abilities. He grew very tall and lean (he was taller than Baghra by the time he was fifteen), his muscles coiling in ripples beneath his flesh. He could chop wood for hours, he could slaughter a goat with his own hands, he could lie stretched out on the forest floor for a full day waiting for the best shot at a deer’s eyeball. 

His face became sharp and stark like hewed stony; his cheekbones jutted out and his jawline was defined, his pale eyes were shaded by a lofty brow. His expressions became fixed and set; he needed his energy for other things, emotions were draining and for the most part unproductive to daily existence.   

His skin became very pale, it seemed by the time the sun’s rays pierced through the foliage on the mountainside they were severely weakened, but it also grew tough like the hide of an animal from the biting wind and air. His hands were calloused so they were like the bark of the trees and his fingers were long like their branches and just as sturdy.

He hadn’t broken a single bone since the day they climbed up the mountainside. 

He let his hair grow long, it’s childish curls loosened into waves, and it wrapped around his neck. Baghra wouldn’t let it grow any longer, she claimed it made him look like “a wild man”, but he didn’t allow her to cut it shorter than his shoulders; it provided added warmth and in the mountain that was always desired. 

They had only one mirror in the house, it was old and clouded so it provided little use, but he had caught his reflection in the streams sometimes, quick little flashes. He supposed he looked different, but he could not remember what he had looked like before; the years had taken that memory too.

In its place came the knowledge of the seasons, the animals, the trees and the plants, the weather. 

He could smell a storm of rain or a snow in the air; he knew all the birds and beasts by their voices, whether they were calling for their mate or their young or to a challenger or a predator. 

He knew what trees were best for carving and which were best for firewood; what plants were poisonous and which were for medicine, and which were both depending on what part you used. 

Baghra taught him much of this; being the wife of a healer she had learned much of plants and being the daughter of a huntsman she knew all about stalking and slaying of animals. But much of the finer wisdoms Aleksander absorbed for himself, wandering through their side of the mountain, learning its moods and methods, simply through silent observance. 

Silence and observance; they were probably the two greatest virtues Staryy Korol taught him. Afterall, it had served the old mountain well, and now it seemed to take to favoring its darkling.

Ancient things were strange in the way of such things, curses and blessings wove into one: the rose with the thorn, the rain with the flood, the sunlight with the fire, the harvest with death.

So it was with Aleksander it seemed and he accepted it for what it was, the way of things. The mountains stood forever, the rivers flowed for eternity, the land remained always, the seasons never shifted. The world around him never truly changed and over time he felt he was settling into that same state of uniformity.

Maybe the mountain had taken him, in the end.

                                                                                                 *

Aleksander dreamt often.

In the beginning, he dreamt of Annika and her father, just the same scenario of her sky blue dress turning red and his wailing face bent over her limp form. The scene was always distorted, there was no blood truly spilt or her stomach turned out, it was all like a parable or an icon, an image to represent a truth too wonderful or horrifying to grasp. 

At times he dreamt of his father, of Kirill marching into the house smelling spicy and rich like the herbs and ointments he used for medicine and asking why he was still in bed.

“Sasha, you are coming with me today, get up and I will teach you my work,” his voice would say, as strong and warm as a touch. He always called him Sasha, as he had in life as well.

Each time at this exact moment Aleksander would invariably wake and find it was Baghra shaking him awake instead, telling him the chickens and the geese were calling for him. There was something bitterly cruel about being unable to see the fulfillment that promise even in his dreams. 

He had cried about it a few times, always hidden away among the trees because Baghra would stand no tears in her presence and after their first year on the mountain would yell at him if he mentioned Kirill at all.

He had stopped crying when he considered as far as punishments go for a son who caused the death of his father, it was a just and merciful one.

Those dreams had stopped almost as abruptly, after one morning he woke from one of Annika and the room was pitch black as if it were midnight. He had panicked and called out for Baghra, who had somehow made her way to his side and put her hands on his shoulders.

“Aleksander,” she had said, her voice firm but uncharacteristically serene. “I want you to shut your eyes and breathe in and out very deeply. In--” He heard her inhaled dramatically and he did the same. “Out.” The sound of her exhale was slow and prolonged and he mimicked her.

“Keep breathing. Now listen to my words: everything is silent, everything is still. Surrender to that. Listen to the silence, feel the stillness around you.”

It might have been the darkness behind his eyelids or perhaps it was the steady, almost sing-song cadence of her voice, but he did find himself doing as he was told.

He strained his ears to absorb the depth and texture of the silence, how absolute it was, and stretched his senses to feel the stillness, there was not even the hint of any sort of movement.

It was as if he had been plunged into a deep hole or catapulted into the night sky, he couldn’t comprehend of anything beyond or outside his breathing or heartbeat.

“Now when you breathe it, I want you to imagine taking all that silence and stillness into your lungs like the air. Breathe it all in.”

Aleksander did as he was told and he swore he felt as if he were swallowing all of it up like Baghra had said. A profound coolness spread through him and he felt suddenly light, like he would float up above his bed and through the roof into the sky.

“Now listen closely Aleksander: I want you to take all that silence and stillness you breathed in and I want you to imagine bundling it all up inside you, wrap it over and over until it is as small as you can make it. Then let it sink deep into your stomach until you don’t feel it anymore.”

Aleksander didn’t know how he was to do that, he really didn’t seem to be thinking at all, something about what Baghra described felt as if it made sense, like it called out to some instinct deep inside him.

So he did as she said, he wound the silence and stillness up like he had seen Baghra do with her balls of yarn, and around and around itself it went until he felt it shrink as far as it would allow. Then he released it and it dropped like a stone, making it smaller had made it feel somehow heavier, right into his belly.

“When you’ve done that, let your breath out very slowly.”

He hadn’t realized he had been holding his breath; came out in a powerful, harsh huff.

“Open your eyes now, Aleksander.”

He did and now he could see Baghra sitting on the edge of his cot, bent over him, and the room behind all awash with early morning light. Baghra’s face was taut with anxiety and her eyes were so intensely fixated on him that Aleksander was almost terrified at the sight.

But she pulled back and the tension in her face unravelled so suddenly she looked almost ill. She ran her hand over her face and he saw there was a slight tremor in the movement.

Aleksander wanted to ask what happened but he felt that he knew the answer somewhere in the depths of his mind and to voice it, to hear it explained, would summon it again.

Instead Baghra was the one who addressed it. “The next time you wake up and it is all dark, or if you feel that…” She paused, seemed to be searching for the right words. “...That it might _become_ dark, do as you just did now. Can you do that?”

Aleksander nodded silently.

“Good,” she said, her voice suddenly returning to its regular brusque tone. “Now hurry and get dressed, the chickens are going mad with hunger.”

After that day, Aleksander determined that whatever he had running in his veins, if it could frighten his mother, a hard woman and a Grisha Heartrender, was nothing he wanted to comprehend or should be utilized. He knew it had killed Annika, and that in turn had killed their fathers.

Normal Grisha powers were simply that, power like ammunition in a gun, neither good nor evil but the user made it so.

His was not like that. His brought only evil and sorrow. That was the sign of a curse. 

So he buried it deep, deep in his belly where Baghra told him too, and along with it the bodies of his father, Annika and her father. With his memories of Anatevka and his neighbors, of his childhood playmates and games, with all his innocence and emotion. Without those, it remained unprovoked, silent and still.

That was safest.

                                                                                           * 

He didn’t dream for a long time after that; for so long he thought he had lost the ability to.

 _Maybe_ , he thought, _it has something to do with becoming part of the mountain._

Did dreams imply sentience, a soul?

Animals dreamed, he had seen dogs twitch and whimper as if they were chasing cats in their sleep, but it did not make them men.

Staryy Korol was alive in some strange manner, its unspoken power spoke of it, and the land and the sky and the water had a life to them.

But what made the life in them and in the animals different than the life in him?

_Men can become beasts._

Could men also become like other things around them, object and elements? Was that debasement? But what made a man so much better than any other thing in this world? Who had spoken and declared man was above all things and to be like them, to shed one’s humanity, was an evil thing?

He seemed preferable to him to be able to just stand and be, like Staryy Korol. The wind battered, the rain pelted, the earth shook, but it remained and was untouched by it.

Aleksander envied that. So when he was dreamless for so long, it gave a cold comfort, which he found was the only kind he accepted. Warm and gentle things he put aside, they did not serve him, the cold and the hard made him strong and so he drew them into himself.

The weighty feel of the musket or the ax in his hands and the fiery pain of his muscles as he held the musket in place or swung the ax for hours.

The frigidness of the winter snow, the lashing of the spring rains, the firmness of the tree roots that drove into the mountain rock.  

The glint of the knife as it cut through the throat of the animal he was slaughtering, the gleam in the eyes of a fox darting after a rabbit, the wrenching of a hawk’s talons into the breast of a sparrow.

He absorbed these traits; endurance, swiftness, patience and ruthlessness. They became his mentors, strong, wise and infinite in experience, and he was an apt pupil.

But dreaming returned, rather abruptly, when he was fifteen. He didn’t know what suddenly provoked them to return but once began they came every night.

But odder than that still, was the subject of these dreams: Sankta Alina.

Aleksander had left religion at the foot of Staryy Korol, Baghra had brought no icons and never spoke of the saints again. It was not so much that they denied religion, one could not live on the mountain and not believe in a power outside and above themselves, but it did not mean that power was benevolent or concerned or even acknowledged you.

Aleksander saw religion as he saw the weather, its existence was undeniable but its intents were unpredictable and unfeeling. It simply _was_ , like all things were, except mankind. He hadn’t prayed or lit a candle in seven years.

And yet the Sankta appeared, clothed in pure white with a golden halo around her head, just had she had been depicted in the icons, standing at the foot of his bed.

Her dark eyes had a strange kind of gravity to them, her gaze seemed to reel you into it like thread on Baghra’s spinning wheel, and there was a spectrum of emotion in them that defied Aleksander’s stunted sentimental reach.

Her face was breathtaking but in the painful and uncanny way of unnatural and inhuman perfection, she was too beautiful to provoke love, it only stirred awe and fear.

The first few times he dreamt, he had only seen her appear to him as she did in the icons, brilliant but unmoving and unspeaking, a mere symbol of a living being. She would remain standing at the foot of his bed and staring at his face but just as in the icons her gaze was unfocused and disconnected, as if she were peering past the veil of this world into the next.

There is no real time in dreams so sometimes he thought she stood there for hours and other times for only a moment, but each time he lay motionless. He did not feel fear or even confusion in the dreams, but rather a mixture of superstitious anticipation and bitter resentment. It was as if he felt if he ignored her, she would vanish.

During the day he refused to think on the dreams, trying to push them down as he had done with his cursed power, his memories and his emotions. Yet she still appeared every night and every night just as constant and vivid as before.

He never heard or saw her breathe. She was so pale she hardly seemed to have any blood, even her hair was a ghostly white as if all color had been washed out of her by the expanse of time, and her detached expression added the the aura.

But her eyes, they were what kept him from denying her, from driving her down into himself. Her eyes were like Staryy Korol: you could close your eyes, look away, even run but it remained, locked in eternal stillness and yet somehow more alive than anything surrounding it.

Her eyes had a power like Staryy Korol, ancient and vast, and it would not be denied.

So after seven nights of this, he finally gave in and spoke to her in the dream, saying, “Why have you come here?”

Sankta Alina had looked down at him (in the dream he was always lying in bed) and her eyes bored directly into his eyes.

Despite their dark hue looking into them was like looking into the sun, not for any physical brightness but the weight of her stare, the density of emotion, the expression of endless knowledge and foresight. It overcame him completely and he looked away, and found he had woken.

The next night he tried once again, but taking a more respectful tone: “Sankta Alina, please tell me why you have come unto me.”

Speaking her name and her title seemed to be the proper invocation. She looked at him and her gaze, though still filled with all he had seen the night before, did not crush him.

“Tell me your name and I shall tell you my reason.”

That request sent a jolt of alarm through him, like a rabbit catching the scent of a fox in the wind. “I shall not tell you my name.”

Her eyes flashed, grew hard, and he felt pressure building on his chest as if Staryy Korol had been set upon it. Just when he thought his ribs would break, his lungs collapse and he would perish, he awoke.

The next evening she spoke to him without invocation. “Tell me your name and I will tell you my reason.”

This time he chose his answer very carefully, he had thought about it all day and somehow it had followed him even into his dream. “Sankta, why do you not know my name as you are the Mother of all of Ravka? Do you not know your children?”

“You are not my child.”

Those words had sent an iciness through him. “I was dedicated to you in the church, so that you should know me.”

“You are not of the church anymore. You do not have my icon to mark your home or any candle to draw me to you.” She lifted her eyes and her right hand, spreading her fingers out delicately, as if she were touching something fragile that was invisible to him.

“My children are like the stars in the sky, I see them sparkle before my eyes. But you--” Here her eyes dropped to his again. “Are like the space between the stars. I can sense you, but I cannot see you.”

“Is that why you have come, Sankta? To bring me back to the church?”

Her hand lowered, reaching out towards him. Though she was at the foot of his bed her fingers seemed to be a breath away from his face, yet her arm did not seem any longer than it had been a moment before.

“Tell me your name and I will answer you.”

He hesitated, then whispered, “Why do you wish to know me, Sankta? Who am I to you?”

The expression in her eyes shifted again, a hazy kind of searching filled them, the kind he had sometimes seen in his mother’s eyes and knew she was thinking about his father.

Then she drew her hand back and he woke again.

The third night neither of them spoke for a long time, but simply stared at one another for a very long time.

“Merciful Alina, why did you not watch over Annika?” He spoke as softly as possible, fearing speaking the name would summon his curse.

Perhaps her presence kept it in check because nothing happened. She did not even answer at first, simply tilting her head as if she did not know what he spoke of.

“You are not the saint of the motherless children, why did you not help her when she was hungry and cold?”

 _Is it not your fault this suffering came to be and not my own?_ He thought, but did not dare say it. Instead he said, “Why did you not save her life?”

“I am not the saint of death,” she said simply. “Death is a stranger to me, I have no authority over it.”

“What about before?”

She studied him for a time and then said, “Answer me this: One farmer prays for rain to water his fields. It rains and his crops prosper.

“But his neighbors crops desired sunlight and perished. Was it the fault of the rain or the farmer who prayed for it or the farmer who picked the wrong crops?”

He considered what she had said and finally had to say, “It was no one’s fault.”

She nodded. “Answer me this as well: The hunter goes out and kills a doe to bring home to his hungry children.

“But the doe had two fawns who are now motherless and will surely die without her.

“Should the man have let his children starve for the doe’s fawns?”

“...No.”

“Thus it is with all things in life,” Sankta Alina said with finality. “To bless one, a curse falls on another. For the sun to shine upon one side of the earth it must leave the other, casting some into darkness who needed light and glaring upon those who desired darkness.”

She held out her hands in a manner that might have looked helpless in a normal woman but only appeared declarative with her.

“Thus it is with my favor. When I anointed the first tsar that meant there were many other men who were prevented from ruling supremely. Others who were made the tsar's subjects and even more still were killed by him. Must it not have seemed a curse to them? But it was a blessing to the tsar and his family and to those who served him faithfully. And it was in the end a blessing for Ravka.”

She lowered her hands and looked at him with an expression that bordered on compassion and her voice when she spoke was nearly comforting. “So you see, perhaps her death was a blessing you cannot yet see.”

He woke after that and thought of her words all day long; he was so distracted Baghra yelled at him for giving too much seed to the chickens, ducks and geese and later for forgetting to chop and bring in the firewood.

In the middle of the latter tirade she stopped suddenly and her eyes narrowed; Baghra’s eyes reminded him of birds eyes, sometimes the dark insight of a raven and sometimes the pristine menace of a hawk’s.

Today they were a raven’s as her eyes inspecting his own eyes and face closely.

Aleksander stared back expressionlessly; when you kept your sentiments squashed it was a simple thing to let your face set into an empty expanse.

It was like frostbite, once you let it eat up enough of a limb, you could cut it off and your nerves wouldn’t know any better. The body was an easy thing to trick and manipulate as long as your mind was focused enough.

Baghra was different from him in that way, she wore her emotions like a pair of fangs to ward people away. It generally worked, he supposed, with other folk.

“What’s got to you, boy?” she said finally after a long moment of examination.

“I am merely tired.”

“You’ve slept fine these past days. Deeper than usual I’d even say.” She paused, waiting for a denial or confession, but Aleksander said nothing. “What is it really. Aleksander?”

“I told you, nothing.”

“No, you said it was because you were tired.”

“And that’s nothing, really.”

Baghra’s expression became hawk-like now, fiercer and more hostile. “It’s strange to me a boy would keep secrets from his mother, especially when she’s the only soul he has to share anything with.”

“I don’t think it’s any stranger than a mother doing the same.”

She seemed offended by that. “What secrets have I kept?” she snapped.

“You and my father hid your powers from me,” Aleksander said calmly. “You even refused to tell me of my own as a child. You’ve never told me why you kept me from being taken like other Grisha children. You said only they would make me a monster.”

He stared steadily into Baghra’s her eyes. He recalled the Sankta’s eyes and felt as if he were summoning a touch of their power into his own gaze.

“Would you like to talk about that, Baghra?” he said evenly.

Baghra stared at him with the closest thing to shock he had ever seen in her face.

“Or perhaps you’d like to discuss _my_ power. What about that?”

Baghra glared at him with outright viciousness but there was an edge to it, the kind that flashes in a fox's eyes when it is cornered and turns to snarl, a ferociousness born of fear.

He felt a deep coolness pooling in his chest; she would not retaliate with words or blows.

Superstition was sewn into her soul and in superstition to speak things is to give them life, power. So no one ever spoke against the evil eye, but wagged their ring and forefinger at it to ward it off.

Secrets were like that, they could be in plain sight and known to all, but as long as it wasn’t spoken it didn’t really exist.

“I’ll chop extra wood tomorrow,” he said, walking around Baghra towards his cot. “When I wake up.”

                                                                                              *

“Why will you not tell me your name?” Sankta Alina asked that night.

“I am afraid of you, Sankta,” Aleksander admitted. It seemed an easier, less dangerous thing to confess in a dream. If he were awake he would rather cut his tongue out than admit such a thing.

“Why do you fear me?”

He looked in her dark, unfathomable eyes. “Because you are like Staryy Korol. Your power is old, so it not set in the rules of common men. What can I know of your intentions for me?”

“I am Alina the Merciful, the Mother of Ravka,” she said but her voice was too grand to command the comfort the titles were meant to conjure in him. She was proud of those names, but did not seem much concerned with what they invoked. “If you are a true son of Ravka, why would you fear me?”

“It is like you said, your blessings carry curses too. Ravka has given me enough curses to last a lifetime.”

“What curses?”

He was silent for what seemed a very long time in the dream. Sankta Alina moved towards him for the first time in all their meetings and sat on the edge of his cot. There was something new in her eyes, a kind of rapt curiosity; it was not saintly compassion but rather like a child anticipating a friend’s secret.  

He recalled that Sankta Alina had been a child once too, he has seen icons of her as one many times, and for a moment she seemed very young to him and not so foreign or unearthly.

Perhaps that is what gave him the incentive to whisper, softly not because of any pretense of secrecy but because it seemed even in a dream to take much effort to speak it. “There is a great darkness within me.”

“I am Sol Koroleva,” she whispered, again like a child sharing a friend’s confidence. “I drive out darkness. I could burn it out of you.”

“Even you could not cast this out.”

“Why not?” A disbelieving, defiant tone; again so much like a child.

He thought of Annika and her bloody blue dress. He thought of his hands bleeding out blackness. “As you said, for the sun to shine on some, it must leave some in darkness. I am that darkness that comes after your light.”

Sankta Alina’s brow furrowed, light shadows on her ivory brow. It was the first bit of darkness he had seen in her face other than her eyes and it gave it another dimension, a more tangible depth and angle to her features. For the first time she looked like a living human before him than an icon, a mere symbol of a human.

“Do you think yourself so great you can blot out my light?”

“It only takes a little stain to ruin a white shirt.”

“It only take a little candle to brighten a dark room.”

“And the brightest lights cast the darkest shadows.”

Sankta Alina tilted her head and again the movement rearranged the angle of her face in his vision. Her eyes were wondering, simply and plainly, she did not seem a child now but still young, closer to him.

“Why do you have so many excuses? Do you not want to be rid of the darkness?”

There was no accusation in her voice, it was an honest question.

It struck him then how long it had been since he had heard any kind of honesty. He realized now how dominated by lies his life had been, as a child with his parents hiding theirs and his powers away and as a young man on the mountain with his mother.

His chest suddenly felt full as if he had inhaled water and it seemed to be seeping out through his eyes. His tears were oddly cool and felt heavy, they seemed to ooze down his face.

Sankta Alina frowned and reached out, touching his cheek. Her fingers were very warm, like the heat wafting off a low fire, and when she pulled them away her fingertips were dripping black.

“You see?” Aleksander heard himself say, but these words truly seemed to come out of the dream itself, for he did not know what he was saying before he spoke or even as he spoke it. “My name will bring a curse upon you. My name is too dirty to be spoken by a saint.”

Sankta Alina was looking at her hands, watching the black dribble off of them with a look like fascination. When she looked back at him there was a brand new look in them: a kinship.

“Saints make things holy. They purify. Do you know how?” When he didn’t answer she said softly, “Just by speaking. Tell me your name, child.”

Aleksander’s throat felt full, like he had swallowed quicksand, and so he simply shook his head.

Sankta Alina exhaled deeply and the room seemed to glow a little, as if her very breath imparted light. Then she bent and pressed her lips against his forehead, very lightly, so he only felt as if a single sunray danced across his skin.

“One day, when you are ready, come to me. I was born out of the water and light, I will cleanse you. Until then, you rest, darkling.”

Then Sankta Alina stood and turned her back to him and Aleksander woke up. All the rest of the day he kept touching and rubbing his forehead where her lips had been.

Baghra noticed and put her hand to his forehead. “So that’s what has you in a foul mood--you’re falling ill.”

He was somewhat feverish for the whole day but he did not actually grow sick over the days after that. Aleksander knew he wasn’t, he had never been sick once since they came up the mountain.

He did not dream of Sankta Alina again after that but that spot on his skin never seemed to grow cold even in the dead of winter.

He thought often on those dreams but all that came to him was the thought:

_You are of water and light, but I am of stone and darkness. They do not move one another, they simply stand side by side._

He didn’t feel comfort from the words or discomfort. They simply sat in his head like Staryy Korol, existing.

And that was Aleksander’s state, merely existing, three years later when he found the man lying face down in the snow during a blizzard.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter wrote itself more in the sense that towards the end I simply wrote down whatever popped into my mind, mostly because I know my perfectionist tendencies would have halted production entirely if I didn't, and thusly to ensure that the fic will continue I had to surrender to the current of my inspiration. So I have the interesting and bizarre sense of being a spectator to my own work.
> 
> Which is why I'm terribly pleased with the parallels between Alina's dream and Aleksander's last dream; in Alina's the kiss is more obviously romantic and Aleksander declares he'll be coming to her, whereas in Aleksander's dream the kiss is platonic and she tells him to come to her. But the discussion of "balance", specifically that of light and dark pop up in both of their respective dreams. 
> 
> As for the blessings and curses theme I actually totally forgot that I had Aleksander musing on that earlier in the chapter before Alina discusses it with him in his dream. So either my mind subconsciously recalled it as I was "trance" writing or I got lucky, you be the judge. 
> 
> (It made me think of the verse in Matthew 5:45: "For He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.")
> 
> Honestly the concept of "balance" is an interesting one because the general philosophy of it is one I don't agree with, basically that evil must exist for good to exist (I mean, it's just such a warped idea if you think about it: must some children be abused so others won't, some women raped so another women won't?). But the idea that there is a "balance" in the world, either literally, metaphorically, cosmically, spiritually etc is one I wouldn't write out or deny outright. 
> 
> In Christian theology, Christ had to die to fulfill the law that only death can satisfy and atone for sin, conceptually keeping the "balance" of such laws, and yet that fact that He was innocent and in the end rose from Hell and Death, it also overrode the law. God is love (I always thought it an interesting concept that love is not an attribute, aka God is merciful, but He literally IS love) and yet judgement for sinful living is still an acute reality of Christian theology. 
> 
> Also in Christian theology since evil is an invasive force (coming into the perfect world through Adam and Eve) it's seen as something to be entirely eradicated, versus tolerated or part of the true natural state of things. 
> 
> So the ideas of "law" (fulfilling it through righteous judgment, wrath and justice) contrasted with "grace" (overriding the law with mercy, compassion and love) are ones that always fascinated me, if they were truly about "balance" or something else.
> 
> Speaking of Christ, one of the things I've intentionally not addressed is the lack of a deity or deities in this world, which was something that confused me in the actual canon. Why are there saints but no god(s)? What makes a saint if there is not religious/philosophical standard for them to meet? And if one was created by one person, why should another person accept those standards? If morality is established by a mere man, can it ever be held as a constant or will it change from person to person, culture to culture, generation to generation?
> 
> I've realized this has become rambly so I'll end this here by saying in conclusion these are all things I wanted to discuss in the story anyway so hopefully I can communicate them with more lucidity in-Universe.
> 
> (PS also fuck those * I had to manually set them all and it was nightmarish and half of them are not in the right place but what can you do?)
> 
> (PPS Also I can't figure out why my notes from the FIRST chapter are here under the second chapter???)


	3. Chapter Two

_ Snow is the throat of death. It swallows and closes around all, smothers and stifles the seedling and the root. Starvation is its teeth, tearing away at the belly, and suffering are its hands, strangling the neck. _

-Ancient Shu Han Adage 

_ Snow is the renewer. It brings rest for the earth, water for the land, quiet for the people. There is no spring without winter, just as there is no life without death.  _

-Common Ferdjan Saying 

_ Snow is the soul of Ravka. _

-Old Ravkan Proverb 

 

                                                                                      *

 

Alina kept a hothouse in her palace, one massive enough to host a royal ball, exactly in the case of weather like this. 

Snow pelted the walls and windows of the palace and Ravka as a whole was in the throes of its most inhospitable and unbecoming moods, the early assault of winter. Once the snow settled, sure in its conquest, the sight could be a wondrous one. But winter always entered like a starved wolf, baring and gnashing its teeth at all, as if in vengeance for being held off for an entire year. 

Alina had endured enough of these winters in six hundred years to feel justified in escaping them these days. The hothouse had been made years ago (she had lost count of how many exactly, after a few generations one tended to ignore the passage of time) at her request, hoping to bring some cheer to the dreary winter days. 

Since then it had done wonders for her mood, not only was the warmth, color and scent of the place welcoming, but tending to the garden provided her with a pleasant distraction. 

There were official gardeners of course, the garden was so vast and had such an array of plantlife that Alina could not possibly devote her time to its upkeep. But whenever she could, she took the time to do a minor task, whether it was watering or planting or pulling up weeds. 

Something about helping to produce life was intensely fulfilling and soothing to Alina. 

She was currently pruning a rosebush, her white hair bound up in a bun to avoid the sweat dampened her face and neck. She was wearing one of her lightest and loosest dresses, almost a shift in comparison to her usual fare, but to a common Ravkan it could have passed for the gown of a boyarina. 

Alina had been working on this rosebush for roughly thirty minutes, using the simple task as a method to focus her mind for the greater enterprise at hand today. 

She had invited Nikolai Alexandrovich Lantsov XVI to speak with her today.   

_ Sixteen is far too many tsars of the same name,  _ Alina thought idly.  _ They need to add more variety to this line. _

But that was none of her concern; really this boy shouldn’t be  _ any _ of her concern. But since his father had so deigned to dismiss her advice over the years of his reign and also neglect overseeing the boy’s overall education as the future tsar, she supposed this was all that could be done given the short time and her resources. 

Well, relatively short; Aleksander probably had a good twenty years left in him. If she had a say in that, she would have encouraged him to produce more heirs and sooner than he had, but again, that shouldn’t have been  _ her _ concern in the first place.

The tsars in recent generations had become increasingly hands off in their parenting. The heirs were given over to nannies and tutors for rearing and education; even upon their coming of age and entrance into society they were promptly some minor court role to execute, out of the way of the reigning ruler. 

Alina had never approved of this method, at least when it came to parent-child relationships. She recalled vividly the early days of the tsars when a father would bring his heir along on war campaigns and have him sit in during meetings with the boyars. 

It wasn’t a guaranteed recipe for a good ruler but at least there was some management of quality. 

Alina’s duties did not extend to commanding the tsar’s personal life; her position in life was too high and encompassed too broad an array of matters to focus on such a minor singular issue as that.

If the tsar took mistresses and had many bastard children, it was none of her affair; if he loved one of his children and despised the other, she made no comment; if he drank or feasted too much, there was nothing she had to say. As long as the tsar made the proper public overtures and kept a basic facade of decency, especially in his deference to her and the church, private missteps and habits could be overlooked. 

That was another aspect that had changed over the years; initially Alina had been far more personally involved with the tsars, as she had been with Nikolai I. But of course that was when Ravka’s vastness was still untamed and unchecked so a more united political alliance was required. 

She still remembered quite clearly her first meeting with Nikolai I. She had been only thirteen, still all lanky limbs, knobby knees and haywire hair, but she had been a saint full five years now and the Apparat had drilled into her head that whatever fault or shortcomings she had was to be played off as some sort of mystical virtue or aspect. 

So her graceless and unpolished mannerism, the natural jittery awkwardness of a girl in the throes of shedding off girlhood, was presented as a kind of holy foolishness. 

She was too absorbed with the things above to be bothered by such lowly trifles as poise, which in those wild days was next to useless in a land utterly consumed by warfare. 

She was still a true Ravkan girl, born of the mill and the wheat and the snow; she was unpretentious and unembellished, one of the people, akin to all their affliction and troubles. 

That had been what made a saint then, what drew the people to her; a wounded and unambitious innocent who had loosed her misery like a vengence upon her enemies and used the fire of it to purify herself. Suffering became a strength and weakness a weapon, and since those were the only experiences that every Ravkan great and small could afford, it gave a strange kind of hope. 

That their curses could become blessings was their only hope. 

Alina had been brought in by Ana Kuya, the Apparat’s wife, the one who instilled good Ravkan sense and morals in her charge. Alina remembered her yanking at the skirt of Alina’s white dress in a vain attempt to straighten it’s rumples.

She had been grumbling under her breath about the foolishness of a messy child wearing white to denote some holiness when all it managed was to make her look sullied. Alina had been wandering through the meadow that surrounded the church, picking yellow flowers to weave into a crown for her head, and so her dress was consequently stained with dirt and grass. 

That was the one piece of her sainthood that Alina had chosen for herself. The later gold aspects in her apparel, from the grandiose haloed headdresses to the embroidered detailings of the sun and its rays into her gowns, came from her childhood habit of those humble petaled circlets. 

It had also been one of the only things of her past she had been able to keep; her mother had used to make them for her when she was a child and it just so happened her mother’s favorite color was yellow. 

Alina often wondered if that was simply a happy coincidence or some prophetic revelation, that her mother would pick a color that so well served to symbolize her daughter’s power. She always hoped for the former, she liked to imagine her childhood as ordinary as possible, it was nice to believe she had been ordinary once, even just for a brief moment in time. 

Nikolai had been standing with the Apparat in the center of the nave in Keramzin, that first little church that was no bigger than a barn, with no chairs or pews because Ravkans worship and pray on their feet or on their knees. There had been a saying in her childhood on that tradition: “In Ravka, one’s faith can only extend as far as one’s own limbs.” 

It had gone out of use about fifty years into her reign. 

She would never forget how the light from the little square windows cut out of the wooden walls on all sides caught him up in a marvelous sunny glow. 

He was like a living candle; his build was so lofty and lean, topped by a head of honeyed tresses and skin with just a slight tawny touch, and his smile dazzled so brilliantly that you were almost tempted to squint. Even standing still his dynamism and charisma practically danced and shone off of him like a happy flame. 

_ Sunkissed _ , that was the first word that came to her upon sight of him. She had approached him jauntily--she had greeted whole village-worths of people by this point and had lost most of her sense of intimidation--holding out her hand to be kissed. 

He had looked at her with eyes that glimmered like the sea between green and blue, and that face so beautiful; the Lantsov’s always had a round softness to their fine features, as if their golden glow diffused the sharp edges of their angles. 

He took her breath away, he truly did, it was like a pleasant kind of sun stroke. 

He had bent onto one knee (she remembered worrying he would dirty his kefta, it was the most brilliant shade of red she had ever seen; it had been the color of luck in those days) and tenderly took her soft, thin hand in his long calloused one. 

She had many times afterwards been misquoted as describing Nikolai as “a gentleman” in the modern sense of the word of a polite and posies man of high society; but in truth she had meant he was “a gentle man,” in spite of all his cunning and ruthlessness in politics and battle, he always contained an innate gentleness in his manner. 

Perhaps that is why the Apparat had convinced her to endorse him as tsar, maybe he had seen that aspect of Nikolai as well and thought it a safer gamble that it would extend into his rule. 

It had later been spun that Alina had chosen Nikolai out of some holy inspiration, but in truth she was simply in childish love with him. She had liked him better than any of the other clan leaders and warlords she had met, she could say that at the very least. 

The kiss he placed on her knuckles was entirely proper and chaste, he was afterall a man at least six years her senior, but the brief contact on his lips on her skin made butterflies explode in her stomach. 

She was just at that age where those little innocent fancies begin to spring up, girlish giggles and bashful blushes. It would be two more years before more heady thoughts would enter her head and another after that before she married.

While his head was bent over her hand she placed her other hand on his head, usually this was the standard ritual for blessings, but she was driven more by the desire of touching his hair. 

It was soft like the downy fluff of a chick, it reminded her of the little chickens she had fed by hand back in Dva Stolba, their little heartbeats pittering against her fingertips. It was a warm, comforting memory and it only made her love him more for bringing it to her recollection. 

“May the sun forever shine upon your face and path, for your deference in the little is honor to the great,” she had recited, her voice bubbly much to Ana Kuya’s obvious chagrin. The Apparat wrote most of her early blessings but Alina was slowly learning the art of it. “And may all your chickens grow fat and lay enough eggs for your own and more left over to sell.” 

She still had some way to go; but she couldn’t resist saying something about chickens now that they were on her mind. 

The Apparat, who stood by Nikolai’s side, cloaked as always in black robes that served a stark contrast to the golden man beside him, gave her a perplexed look and Ana Kuya clearly was holding back a sigh. 

But Nikolai, whose head had now lifted to look at her again as she had removed her hand from his head, smiled merrily at her. 

“My most heartfelt gratitude to you, kind Sankta, for your blessing,” he said and his voice was warm and easy like summertime but as clear and strong as a trumpet. “My birds are grateful that you think of them as well, as you said the honors we give to the small will be reflected to us later in the mighty.” 

Alina barely understood her own blessing, much less his reiteration of it; the Lantsov’s had a way of taking the work of others and making it their own, which served them very well throughout their generations. She just knew his validation of the truth of “her” blessing made her feel giddy. 

The Apparat always gave her a basic conversational structure for meetings with the clan leaders or warlords. When she had been younger he had spoken for her almost entirely, but now with her age he was granting her more autonomy. 

“The Apparat tells me you have shown great kindness towards the faithful, unlike many other men of authority in our land,” she had said. 

Persecution at the start of her sainthood had been particularly brutal; the leaders in the land knew a figure promising eternal rewards from the heavens could easily overshadow their momentary earthly threats.

“I and all the faithful bless for your magnanimity. I shall surely remember you firstly in my prayers for this.”

Nikolai smiled again and she noticed he had a slight mustache over his lip, his hair was so fair it was barely noticeable. 

Facial hair was a sign of masculinity in old Ravka; it was one traditional Alina had been glad to see fade away as she had always hated it. It suited Nikolai though. 

“Sankta is most gracious,” he said. “Though I humbly request she remember my wife before myself, as she is one of your blessed faithful and was the one to turn me towards you.” 

Alina frowned before she could stop herself. “You are married?”

“Yes, Sankta.”

That was a terrible disappointment. She had to try very hard to recover and not let it show on her face but the raised eyebrow of the Apparat and the little hidden nudge to her rib Ana Kuya gave her meant she probably failed. 

“Marriage is the best of man’s institutions,” she had said dutifully, though with an audible lack of conviction. “May it bring you joy and many children.” 

“My wife shall be honored by your blessing,” Nikolai had said kindly, but she felt sour--she didn’t want to talk about his wife. Alina eventually met Nikolai’s wife, Vasilisa, perhaps two years later and ironically grew very fond of her; they remained close companions for the rest of Vasilisa’s life. 

The rest of the meeting went mostly as the histories had recorded it, the Apparat had guided most of the conversation from then out and it had ended with Nikolai offering his support of her sainthood with his army. That began an alliance that lasted sixty-eight years until Nikolai’s death. It had outlived the first Apparat and Ana Kuya, it had even outlived Alina’s marriage. 

There had once been talk of Alina marrying into the tsar’s line, when Nikolai’s great grandson was on the throne, but she had always dismissed such notions. She stated that the state and church should remain equal but separate to preserve balance, one not overriding the will of the other.

That was truly the core reasoning behind her decision but along with it was she couldn’t imagine marrying the great grandchild of a man she had been half in love with for a time. And after her husband, she didn’t want to marry again. 

She had for brief moments, when things were going very badly with her husband (which was most of the time), entertained the fantasy of being married to Nikolai. But those daydreams left bitter traces in her; partly out of guilt for insulting his faithful wife for desiring her lawful husband, and partly because she knew it would never have been an option, even if Nikolai hadn’t been married.

Alina had once likened Nikolai to a man of good taste who buys a lovely clock, he admires its shape and mechanics, is pleased by its steady ticking and good timing, takes care to polish it and show it off to his guests. But if the clock were to break, Nikolai would be at a loss as to what was amiss or how to repair it; he would have to find a clockmaker to restore it. 

Alina was that clock. Nikolai always held her in great regard and esteem, but he could never fully comprehend her. He was very much a man of this world, of war and diplomacy and reason, the struggles of the present; it made for an excellent tsar. 

Matters of the spirit, the invisible and intangible, were of no interest to him. What he couldn’t see with his eyes or touch with his hands was a thing he couldn’t employ and therefore could not be bothered with. 

It made for a good balance, a man of the material and a woman of the immaterial, and a good friendship. But it would have made for an unfulfilled and uneven romance. 

No, Nikolai had been happy with his wife and better off for it. Alina could not say she had been either with her own husband, but that was for more or less the same reasons it would not have been much better with Nikolai.

If Nikolai had been a man of the world, the ways of man and rulership, Malyen had been a man of earth; the harvest and the hunt were his realm, the heavens mattered only in the rain or sun they gave. He wanted nothing to do with anything higher than the stalks of the wheat or the trees of the forest, the closer to the soil the more content he was. 

Their marriage had been a grotesque mistake, and the outcome had been catastrophic. Looking back on it now, Alina understood what had drawn her to Malyen and compelled her to marry him; he was the only survivor of their village after the raiders and her power had consumed it, and only because he had been off in the forest where he didn’t belong but was always running off to. 

He had returned to find her collapsed in the middle of a sea of dead ash, naked and her once dark hair bleached white. He had been the one to drag her unconscious body two miles to the neighboring village of Keramzin, where the Apparat’s little church stood. 

He had remained in the village, working odd jobs for everyone from the butcher to the carpenter to the farmer, until finally apprenticing himself at twelve to the local huntsman. That had been his true gift, there was not a soul alive who could sniff and smoke out any living creature as Malyen. 

He and Alina saw enough of each other in the beginning, it was a small village like their home had been, and it was before she became renown. But once Nikolai entered the stage and battles were fought in her name, the distance in both miles and experience had grown. 

Alina had married him on impulse, while on a return visit to Keramzin. She was sixteen and seeing him in all his tanned muscled glory, with a tangle of dark hair and those watery blue eyes, looking so free in that wild earthen way, made her head and heart fill with hot headiness. 

He was so  _ real _ , palpable in all the ways she felt she was not, now having fully ascended to the role of Sol Koroleva. She had to be untouchable and unreachable, pristine and immaculate; it was profoundly isolating and cripplingly lonely. 

When Malyen touched her, she felt pulled back down to earth. He seemed so of the earth, she thought he could keep her grounded there, ensure her feet stayed firmly planted. He was familiar, he was the last remnant of Dva Stolba, all that remained of what she could have once been. 

Alina discovered  _ could haves _ and  _ ifs _ were the most false, wasteful and poisonous thoughts one could entertain. 

She was sure Malyen had never quite forgiven her for what her power had done to their home and their families. He would never say it outright, which she honestly found worse, his obvious silent repulsion of her powers was far more painful than any of the insults he hurled in one of their many rows. 

Perhaps he thought he had forgiven her, or would eventually find a way to; maybe he had seen her as a memory to cling to as well. He had been a sentimental person, driven wholly by instinct and emotion, there was little value he places in introspection or forethought with him. 

That must have in no small part contributed to his appetite for drink and women, though she would admit her own intolerance and coolness towards him could not have helped matters. By that point she had to confess she had lost interest in him, his immature ploys to ensure she validated his role in her heart had worn her thin. 

He had become such a child in her eyes and she had not been one for so very long; that had ironically, probably been another reason she had married him, a vain hope to regain her lost childhood. Some things can never be regained, she learned that in the cruelest possible way. 

She often wondered if it was in part because of her, what she had done that day at Dva Stolba, that had stunted him. Losing everything in a single day and growing up an orphan with no true guidance as she had from the Apparat or Ana Kuya must have been difficult (not that he ever spoke of it to her, he never shared much of anything with her during their marriage). 

Perhaps having escaped death had given him a sense of guilt he sought to assuage by making constant use of himself to someone, but once he married her there was none who needed him but her. He was always set aside, made to watch as others came, bowed and begged her for assistance. Purposelessness is a hard thing for a man to endure. 

She had not been attentive to his needs in that area, she saw that now. She assumed that being the husband of Sankta Alina, to be the arms she returned to every evening, the one she bared all her soul to, was enough for him. 

She considered later how unfair this assumption had been; after all, if their roles had been reversed, would she have been content to sit by the fire and spin until he returned home, exhausted by his own grandiose purpose in life, demanding a total focus of attention to hear all of his troubles and soothe all his frustrations? 

Once she had requested Nikolai to grant him a rank in the army, an obvious stroke of nepotism that fooled no one, much less Malyen himself, it was too late. It only provided a venue for his worse habits and unfortunately also a very public one at that. If he wasn’t engaging in drunken brawls, he was whoring his way through the camp women. 

The Apparat, who had been virulently against the union from the start, had been merciful enough to not crow over his foresight. He simply worked to clean up the mess left over, paying both soldiers and women alike to be discreet in their knowledge of the Sankta’s husband’s habits. 

It didn’t erase what Maylen had done, nor did it remove the humiliation inflicted on Alina. 

Their fights had been horrific affairs, to this very day she recalled them with a sick twist of her stomach. The things they said to one another...as a saint she declared there was no sin unforgivable, but as a woman she knew the barbarities they had exchanged were beyond any absolution. 

Divorce had been out of the question, what would it look like to the people to see a circumstance Sankta Alina could not overcome or redeem? But Alina was busy with her holy work, so they could at least live apart with little suspicion. 

“After all,” Malyen had said to her during one of the last fights of their marriage, his words slurred and reeking of kvass. “I’m not of any use, am I?”

They had been separated for seven years when she heard he had taken up with another woman, a simple village girl he had known and befriended in Keramzin during his youth, the time Alina had been occupied with her transfiguration. 

She was called Marya, and was as simple and common as her name had been, plain in form and manner from her neatly braided brown hair, to her wide and guileless hazel eyes, and softly rounded face and figure. 

She was at home in the garden tending her turnips and at the hearth spinning wool at the wheel, soft-spoken and gentle in everything she did. There wasn’t a single lick of flame in her or a single bone of ambition, she was balmy contentment distilled. 

Alina met her only once, when she came to Maylen’s deathbed. He was not even fifty yet but drink and women age men worse than hard work. He and Alina had not spoken in over twenty years but he had requested her presence when he felt his end nearing. 

She had traveled to their modest wooden house, hewn out of the trees and built with Malyen’s own hands as was every piece of furniture within. The walls and furnishings all vivid shades of red, blue, green and yellow and everything was mounted or covered with the heads and hides of animals, stags, wolves, even a bear. 

Malyen had been lying under a pile of the furs of the animals he had hunted and hand-stitched quilts, embroidered with the traditional images--stages, firebirds, churches, and wheat fields. She knew it was Marya’s work without asking, it had a wife’s homey, happy touch. 

Marya had been sitting in a chair by his head, her eyes downcast at her hands in her lap, where Maylen’s old hunting coat lay over her knees. Every inch of it had been restitched and repatched so many times it seemed more a coat of scraps, but Alina could tell that twenty-one years of sentiment had been sewn into every inch of it. 

Their children, five hearty sons and three healthy daughters, had ringed his bed, every single one ruddy-faced, dark haired and fair-eyed as their parents. The youngest child was small enough to sit in his sister’s lap; he stared at Alina solemnly as she came to sit on the edge of the bed beside his father. The others gazed at her with expressions ranging from cautious wonderment to sullen suspicion.

She had come dressed as modestly as her wardrobe allowed, wore dark colors and no jewelry or cosmetics, yet even then she had the appearance of a wealthy woman in her rich fabrics and furs. She felt instantly mismatched against the wholesome commonness of the surroundings. 

That was the first twinge of distance she felt towards her heritage, it had not yet been half a century and she was already a stranger to her roots. But that was a realization that would truly dawn at another time. 

Malyen’s blue eyes were watery with weakness and weariness, and his countenance was ashen, paler than any of the shades of white she wore as a saint. 

When he looked at her there was no swell of love in his face or resentment, simply a tired relief. He barely managed to pull his hand out from under the covers and couldn’t even reach it out towards her; somehow that felt a sadly fitting metaphor for their relationship. 

She reached out and took his hand in hers, it was so clammy and fragile she had to fight the urge drop it immediately. 

Despite having sat by many deathbeds, death itself remained an unsettling aspect to Alina. None of the Apparat’s words on the inevitability and naturalness of it assuaged the profound instinct to flee every time she was confronted with it. 

Later she theorized it might have been her immortality, perhaps it made her incapable of relating to this part of the human experience. 

There was silence between them for a stretch of time, only Malyen’s labored breathing to be heard. 

When he finally spoke, his voice was rasping and quavering. “Sticks,” he said, using her childhood nickname. “Thank you...for coming.” 

“Of course,” Alina said softly, putting her other hand over his, trying to force herself to ignore the damp limpness of it. It disturbed her that the only emotion she could summon upon seeing her husband dying was vague discomfort at his physical state. 

Malyen had to take many deep, shaky breaths to speak. “I must ask...your forgiveness. For my actions during our marriage. My faithlessness in heart and body...and my resentment that I used to excuse it.” 

He paused, a cough seizing him.

“Malyen, don’t exert yourself--” She attempted to say but he shook his head heavily, causing her protest to die on her lips. 

It took him some time before he could resume. “Your Apparat...he was right when he told you I was bitter at your ascension.” 

He looked directly into her eyes, something he had rarely done during their marriage. 

“I was angry that you were so glorified. As children, before your light came, you were in so much in need of me. I don’t know if you remember, how it was before all this--I was always the strong one, your savior, your hero.”

Alina  _ did _ remember; being a thin and sickly girl who couldn’t run any distance without losing her breath and hadn’t even the strength to climb a tree. Malyen, always healthy and robust, would always be the one convincing the other children to include her, giving her rides on his back and pulling her up into the branches of the trees. 

She had been so wholly dependent on him, entirely devoted, the only child in the village she considered her friend, the only one who didn’t tease her for her ugly matted hair and bony body. 

So much of that nostalgia had fueled her desire to marry him, that memory of childhood comfort and security. 

Maylen was still speaking, very sluggishly and she perceived it was not only exhaustion but emotion that was causing the heaviness of his voice. 

“I thought I had saved your life when I dragged you all the way to Keramzin,” he said. “Only later did I realize you probably would have survived without my intervention. That was the beginning of it all, you went from strength to strength, transformed into this queen and lady of hope and power. And I realized whatever role I had filled in our childhoods, it was obsolete.”

Wasn’t that the cruelest trick of childhood? It only worked when your mind was a blank slate and your emotions were untried and your personality undeveloped. Going back to childhood would require shedding all of that to return to a state of ignorant emptiness. 

Alina hadn’t longed for that for a very long time. 

“When I married you I thought I could make things as they had been, I could be your hero again,” Maylen continued. “But I went about it all wrong, I wanted you to need me in all the wrong ways, not as a companion or a lover or a friend.”

His eyes unfocused for a brief moment, a deep expression of sorrow flashing across his face, and Alina had the terrible feeling he was recalling their arguments. 

“I wanted to be the knight who delivered you and only that. I could not see myself in any other role, I would not allow it. I could have tried to find a compromise, look for a way my gifts could have served you as a husband and one of the faithful.”

His lips, pale with sickness, quirked into a sad, weak smile.

“But you know how I am. I was always a son of Dva Stolba, I never really left it behind.” 

His fingers squeezed her hand slightly and his eyes darkened with seriousness. 

“You, despite what they call you Rebe Dva Stolba, are not of it anymore. You have transcended it. And that angered me as well, I felt you had forgotten our past, our parents, our home. I didn’t see that some things...some things are never regained. There is redemption in this life…” 

Here his eyes slid to Marya, who, as if she felt his gaze upon her, looked up for the first time and into his eyes. A silent, subtle look passed between them, an unspoken depth of affection and understanding that Alina knew she had never once experienced with Maylen herself.   

“But it does not always mean what you lost will be returned,” Malyen said, his eyes returning to Alina’s and now they were filled with resigned regret. 

“So it was with us, in almost every way. It could have been different, but I did not allow myself to see the ways I could achieve it. I could find a path in any woods, track any wild beast, but I could not find my way to our happiness. I am truly sorry that I did not honor you enough to do so.” 

There was silence for a moment, filled with only the collective breathing of the family and Alina. 

Alina’s mind was straining to search for words; her life was made up of speeches to crowds of hopeful faithful, debates with generals and discussions with rival lords. Yet she could not summon a single sentence to speak to the man she had lived with for ten years. 

Perhaps guilt was weighing her words down. Through all of Malyen’s speech she had felt nothing. All her reactions were to sensations, the dank dampness of the air, the slick sweat of his skin, the guarded gazes of his children. 

But she felt no sorrow, no regret, no anger; she felt  _ nothing _ toward him. 

After the unspoken decision to live apart, Alina had been wracked with guilt by her lack of longing for husband. 

She did not wake up in an empty bed reaching out for him, but rather felt a wave of relief every morning at the reminder of his absence. She walked around her house, taking in the delicious sensation of freedom to move in and out of her rooms, instead of creeping through them in fear of encountering him. 

She could speak her mind freely again without worrying he would for some reason take personal offense or start a row over her opinions; she could invite the company she liked without fearing his uncouth and combative manner would cause a scene; she could be away for however long and however far off she was needed and not dread returning to his resentful and accusatory words.

She had mentioned this to Ana Kuya of all people, not a woman given to maternal warmth or emotional openness despite her role. But she had that old time Ravkan conviction and common sense; she never wasted a breath, a word, or an action needlessly. Maybe Alina sensed that was what she needed most, a kind of permission for her heart to feel this way. 

Ana Kuya had been in the kitchen at their house in Keramzin (she never allowed Alina to hire a cook except for official events that required multiple courses, she cooked all of Alina’s meals daily until the day she died), stirring away at a pot full of rich broth.

“My husband and I knew from the first day it would be so between you and that boy” she had said in the brusque tone she always spoke in (she always referred to Malyen as “the boy”, even to his face). “He is of this old world, where the men go out to hunt and to die on the battlefield and the women stay to cook and die in the birthing bed. There was no evil in it, but no life or hope, it was all hard nails and cold teeth to hew out survival.” 

She had turned and look right at Alina with her small, dark eyes that always seemed to read everyone like sewing pattern. 

“But you, child, have made a new world.” She lifted her wooden spoon and jabbed it in Alina’s direction, the end dripping with broth. “All the old ways are passing away. There is no evil in that either, life is made up of birthing and dying, there is nothing that lasts but the land, the water and the sky.”

Something in Ana Kuya’s expression softened and it was the first time Alina had ever felt the old woman saw her as a full grown woman on equal terms, rather than a child to be corrected. 

“With you, a sun has risen and there will be warm embraces and gentle hands. There will be hours left in the day to live and to rest, rather than racing from evening to morning just to work and eat, birth and bury. My time, my husband’s time, your boy’s time, is gone. Your time and the young man’s time is begun.”

“The young man” is what she called Nikolai. 

She then turned abruptly and went back to stirring the broth, her voice returning to its classic strictness: “So don’t waste your time mourning, child. Life has and will give you enough opportunities for that, don’t create more. Especially for circumstances so undeserving.” 

After that day, Alina had released herself of guilt and had barely spared a thought for her husband since. 

But now, with him lying before her, teetering on the edge of death, it overwhelmed her how much of that forgetfulness might have been out of vengeance as relief. 

She had grasped her freedom with both hands and drank it in massive draughts, all the while she lived it loud enough with the hope that he heard it somewhere and it twisted in his side like a thorn. 

Now she looked at him and there was no victory in it; he was dying and she would live on, and it changed nothing that had come before. 

“There is one more thing I want you to know,” Malyen said. He seemed to be trying to force his voice to rise, as if afraid she might miss it otherwise. “Something I never told you and that I hold as my worse sin.” 

Alina could not imagine after all that had been said and done in their marriage what this sin could possibly entail, but she leaned closer, partly out of curiosity and partly out of consideration that he might wish to keep this between them. 

But when Malyen spoke he didn’t whisper, even though speaking louder obviously pained him, and he kept his eyes trained on Alina’s. 

“I never once blamed you for what happened at Dva Stolba. Never. Not even for a second.”

For the first time in the entirety of their reunion, Alina felt her throat close. She now saw tears were flowing down Malyen’s face and it struck her that never once during their marriage had she seen him weep. 

“I am sorry that in all our years of knowing one another, that is all that I can offer you,” he said and his voice was choked, by emotion or exhaustion she could not tell. 

Alina wasn’t aware she was weeping until she tried to speak and found her voice was strangled almost to the point of unintelligibility. But she could tell by the relief that washed over Malyen’s face that, for perhaps the first time in their entire lives, he understood her.

“It’s redemption enough.” 

She had then put her palm against his forehead, not even noticing the dampness or heat of it, and said the blessing for the dead the Aparat had written for her. When she pulled her hand away, his eyes were closed and his expression was peaceful, his breathing seemed less labored. 

He released her hand and she pulled hers out of his, allowing his wife to take it. She leaned her forehead against his temple and Alina saw her mouth moving against his ear, but she heard nothing of what she said, except the affect it had on Malyen, which was a soft smile gracing his face.

Alina rose and left them there with their children in their warm house. Malyen died only an hour later and Marya followed less than four months after. She was told their children buried them side by side in their garden, under a single plain headstone with no words on it, as was the old Ravkan custom. Too many died to take the time to make such note. 

When she had been told this, perhaps a month after their burial since she had been consumed with work in the months after she had visited them, she had excused herself to her room and cried for the rest of the day.

She hadn’t cried for the loss of her husband; they had parted not as husband and wife, but as friends once again. Redemption enough, as she had said.

She hadn’t cried for Malyen or Marya either, they had gone together as she was certain was their desire. 

She had cried because she saw for the first time what she had always known in her heart, from the very first day the light ripped through her. 

She would never have a headstone, plain or otherwise, set for herself; never be laid to rest besides a faithful husband and mourned by loving children. 

Her marriage had been a painful experience but it had revealed to her the truth of her state. That there was none who could ever fully understand her, that she was utterly alone, wholly unto herself. 

That was the single curse she endured for all her countless blessings.    


“Sankta?” 

Her lady-in-waiting’s voice so startled Alina she almost snipped off an entire rosebud. She touched her temple as if to wipe away sweat to disguise her reaction. 

“Hmmm?” 

“Tsarevich Nikolai is here.” 

Alina’s first thought was  _ How can Nikolai be here when he has been dead for--  _

_ Ah,  _ this _ Nikolai.  _

“Yes, bring him here,” she said, nodding absently at her lady.

Alina turned her attention back to the rosebush and soon she heard the quick, certain footfalls of Nikolai Lantsov XVI as he came down the winding garden path. 

_ Poor little Nikolai, after your marvelous grandsire who can compare? Ever since him, if you’ve seen one Lantsov, you’ve seen them all.  _

 

                                                                                     *

 

Aleksander’s eighteenth birthday passed without any event. He found quickly that it was easier to bear the passage of time when you did not mark it. 

And it changed so little of his daily life there did not seem a point in taking note of it; the same work was required of him and other than he could perform it with more efficiency and endurance, his age had not much of an effect. 

Baghra never made a point to draw attention to his birthday anymore than her own. 

He recalled as a very young child on one of his birthdays, celebrated with one carved toy soldier from his father and a small but delicious cake from his mother, he had asked why his parents never seemed to have birthdays as he did. 

Kirill had laughed at that and Baghra had smiled at her husband; she was never really given to laughter but Kirill was the only person to ever make her truly smile. 

“Once you’re married and have a child, there’s nothing more to celebrate on a birthday. You have it all, now it’s only a counting down till your death.” 

Aleksander hadn’t really understood what death was at the time so he just nodded and turned his attention back to the cake. If there was one thing he actively missed from Anatevka it was sugar; Baghra often brought salt up the mountain but little sugar. He had considered asking why but decided against it; he supposed when their meals consisted mostly of meat and stews there was little purpose for it. 

Aleksander wasn’t sure why sugar was on his mind today, as he waded through the snowbanks towards the cottage. Perhaps it was the snowflakes falling in sheets. Or maybe the hunger gnawing at his stomach. 

He had gone out to check the traps for animals for one last time before the weather locked him in for the rest of winter, but they were just as empty today as they had been yesterday. It was mostly an excuse to stretch his legs, the final opportunity before he would be holed up in the cottage like a rabbit in a burrow or a bear in its cave. 

Except he wouldn’t sleep through the winter like them. 

He would pace back and forth over the scuffed and creaking wood floors staving off madness like a wild beast caged. 

He would lie down on his stiff cot and stare at the wooden slats of the ceiling or the flickering of the fire with his body buzzing with coiled energy like a wasp nest. 

He would listen to the incessant whirring of Baghra’s spinning wheel as it went round and round until his mind felt it was wound out of his skull and stretched thin like the wool she spun. 

Aleksander hated winter. 

It seemed odd to him, one so frigid within, would despise the world when it mirrored his own state. But that might have been the reason, maybe he feared he would finally blend into the surroundings and never rise again. Or perhaps his coldness and stillness made him yearn for warmth and movement. 

Being locked in the same space with Baghra for months didn’t make the prospect any more desirable.

He wasn’t sure if his age was beginning to make him restless or if the silence between had become even more absolute, but he found he could barely stand her presence these days. He had begun waking a good hour earlier than her simply to avoid eating breakfast at the same table and going to bed an hour earlier to prevent having to sit up by the fireplace with her. 

He wasn’t sure when this hatred began; it was like the story he had heard about boiling a toad, if you put it in a pot of water and stoked the fire very slowly it wouldn’t even feel the water heating until it was already dying. 

He thought it must have been sparked when she dragged him out of Anatevka without telling him about his father’s death until he insisted, so he would never have a chance to visit his grave and pay respects. Then perhaps it was fanned when he learned she sold his father’s gun and refused to speak of him afterwards, as if she were trying to scrub his existence out of their very memories. 

Kirill might have died in Anatevka, but Baghra was the one who truly snuffed him out. In Anatevka, the dead were honored and remembered, candles were lit and prayers were spoken for their souls. Baghra seemed to want to smother Kirill’s spirit, stamp him into the earth so he would never rise to trouble her heart again. 

If it were only herself she inflicted this on, Aleksander could forgive her for it; after all she was his wife and her loss therefore was of a different sort than his own, but she forced her twisted grieving onto him. 

Yes, he had locked his father away deep within his stomach, but that had been his choice. Baghra had done nothing but hamstring his choices since she dragged him to the foot of Staryy Korol. Aleksander had found he hated her for that most of all; it wasn’t enough that she wanted to will his father out of existence but now she wanted to hem his in as well.

Somedays it took all the strength within him not to grab her by the shoulders and scream in her face, “Why did you bring me up here with the pretense of living only to murder me with your silence?” 

Their animals were better company than her, he hadn’t given them names so as not to mourn when they were slaughtered for food, but he had sometimes talked to them when he felt he would simply snap from the silence. 

The geese and ducks were rather intolerable with their incessant squawking and the chickens were dull with their inane clucking, but the goats were surprisingly good company, their bright eyes and their bleats seemed to imply some sort of genuine reaction to the tone of his voice if not the spirit of his words. 

_ That reminds me, I need to check the roof of their stall, _ Aleksander thought to himself. He had helped build the small wooden stall that housed the goats during the winter. 

Aleksander threw a quick glance up to the sky; he had known when he stepped out this morning there was a storm rolling in but he also knew he had enough time to do this rounds and return home before it struck. 

The snow was falling thicker now, he was having trouble seeing farther than the length of his arm, and the wind was starting to feel like insistent hands, pushing and pulling at his clothes and body. But he knew the way home with his eyes shut so he wasn’t concerned, he was only a few moments away as it was. 

A sharp gust of wind blew his hair into his face and he reached to brush it out of his eyes which was why he nearly stepped on the man lying in the snow. 

Aleksander stumbled back so suddenly he almost fell over, his heart leaping into his mouth. Then he froze, just as he did when he was hunting and thought an animal had spotted him, and stared at the body. 

It was partly covered with snow, another reason he probably hadn’t seen it earlier, but he knew it could not have been here long because of how heavily the snow was falling. He couldn’t make out really any details of the body except given its size and shape it was probably male.

Aleksander had experienced many close calls on the mountain. 

He had once seen a massive bear lumbering through the woods while he was out hunting, an old brown male three times the size of a mule, and spent over an hour lying among the brush downwind of it rather than risk moving and catching its attention. 

Another time shot at a lean lone wolf that was trying to break into the animal pen from a window of the cottage, the bullet went right through the eye of the wolf and he skinned it and Baghra sewed the fur into the lining of his coat. 

There had once been a rockslide during spring, boulders and even trees were displaced and dragged down the mountainside by the melting snow, and he only just managed to escape being caught up in it by climbing up a tree, which he later theorized might have been even more dangerous if it had been dislodged. 

But Aleksander realized he had not felt outright fear since he the day he had sunk his power into his belly--until he now saw the body in the snow. 

All his child’s fears of oprichnik coming to drag him away rise before his eyes--men clad in black with iron-tipped whips and spiked clubs and even worse, the authority of the tsar to tear him away from his mother and cast him into a dungeon for the rest of his days. Were murders of children allowed trials, even if they had been a child? 

The pang of fear was in reality probably just that, a swift shock to his soul, but he felt as if he stood there frozen for an eternity. 

He wasn’t certain what broke him out of this state, perhaps it was that the body did not move or the wind had begun to grow even more forceful, but Aleksander felt the fear abruptly bleed out of him like the vein of it leading to his heart was cut. 

This man was no oprichnik because no one would send the tsar’s personal police after a murderer’s son who killed a drunkard’s daughter from a poor village. Their lives and deaths weren’t worth the attention of the tsar, their existence or lack of it did not influence his rule or his kingdom. He ruled them, but did not need them, that was the omnipotence of the tsar. 

Aleksander heard the wind begin to moan and felt his body shudder violently; he hadn’t realized how cold he had grown simply by standing still. 

He looked up at the sky and saw the clouds were hanging so low they seemed to skim the branches of the trees. The snow now pouring from them so densely that the body had almost vanished beneath it and Aleksander’s boot were almost completely buried. 

A blizzard. Winter’s fist was closing around him and it wouldn’t release for months. 

_ If I stay here any longer I will die,  _ Aleksander thought. That thought didn’t usually provoke much response in him; he had made the observation many times before on the mountain, it was usually just a sign to change his course. 

But now his choice was beyond taking a different path through the woods to avoid a wild beast or turning back for home because of the weather. Those moments only encompassed himself and his safety.

But now he stared at the body lying before him and for the first time in ten years thought: They _ will die.  _

The snow was becoming a veil across his eyes, smudging out the depth and shape of everything into a single wall of white, he could no barely make out the body lying directly before him. The wind had risen to a howling buffeting, if his feet had not been so buried in snow he was certain he would have been knocked over. 

_ I will die, I will die, I will die _ , the warning sounded in his head down through his whole body, urging him to respond, to move, to leave. 

But another voice, very still and small, was rising from somewhere where his heart was pounding, the singular touch of warmth in the entire surroundings. 

_ They will die. They will die. They will die. _

He heard a cracking sound somewhere to his left and knew the wind had bent a branch until it broke. He felt the wind pushing against him as if trying to push him onto his knees. 

_ You will die, you will die, you will die _ , the voice now said and it seemed to be woven in with the wind. 

For some time after, Aleksander couldn’t say what made him finally choose as he did. But much later, when he had grown more honest with himself, he knew what it had been. 

The voice to abandon the body has been from without, like Baghra’s, ordering him.

The voice to save the body had been from within, like his power, like the memories of Anatevka, of Annika and his father. 

And he was sick of suffocating them. 

So that was how Aleksander ended up pounding on the door of the cottage, his hands too numb to even feel the wood against his gloved flesh, the limp body of a stranger hanging over his shoulder. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a very interesting one to write because I had to address a character who in the canon I have nothing but the most vitriolic hatred for: Malyen Orestev.
> 
> Malyen was to date one of the worst characters I have ever read (Tris from the horrid Divergent series takes first place, but mostly only because she was the protagonist so I couldn't escape her).
> 
> I haven't seen such an accurate depiction of a domestic abuser since Jack Torrance in Kubrick's version of The Shining; Malyen's attitude was in fact so similar to my own father's that there were moments that I had to remind myself: "This isn't dad," as I was writing. 
> 
> It was thankfully easier than I expected, and I hope that I somehow managed to make Malyen if not anyone's favorite character, at least one who is more of a tragic figure than a grotesque one.
> 
> One of the most important things Malyen says to Alina in my opinion is that he didn't allow himself to try to change or see things differently. I feel many relationships start off for the wrong reasons or in a bad place, but I genuinely believe a lot could be saved if both sides were just willing to change and try.
> 
> I don't believe in or like the "soulmate" concept, I believe anyone can be someone's "soulmate" because relationships are about discovering and understanding and choosing to love another person day by day. What a cruel world it would be to miss your soulmate by some chance or mistake and forever be doomed to never be fulfilled in a relationship.
> 
> Like the Apparat and Aleksander's father said: mankind is unique in we can choose what we make of ourselves in this life.
> 
> On a lighter note, I really loved writing the first tsar Nikolai. He of course was influenced by the canonical Nikolai but I really felt his character spun in his own direction just a little bit and his scene despite being so short was a joy to write, so much so that I felt sad at the thought that in-Universe he's dead and I won't be writing him again. And yes I know I "cut" to the next scene before we met the "real" Nikolai but I promise we'll be seeing him soon!


	4. Chapter Three

“ _Any can destroy. The singular power of a ruler is to grant life._ ”

-a famous Ravkan saying attributed to Nikolai I, though assumed to be far older 

“ _To the wolf, the life of the pup is above the life of the sheep. To the sheep, the lamb’s life is above the pup’s. So it is in among the beasts but so it need not be among mankind._

_“The life of a man cannot be exchanged for a woman’s, nor a woman’s for a child, for there is no measure made to quantify the soul. In every life is contained the life of all._ ” 

-Sankta Yelena the Loving from the collection of her sermons  _ “The Embrace Of All”  _ as recorded by historian Basil Ivanov

 

                                                                                          *

 

He fell through the door when Baghra opened it. He hadn’t perceived the weight of the body or his own exhaustion until the humid warmth of the cottage clashed with his icy flesh. 

His vision swam and he felt his body shuddering involuntarily and he could barely remain bowed over on his knees, the body still leaning against his shoulders. The world began to darken and he felt his head begin to sink, literally and figuratively, lower and lower into the embrace of exhaustion. 

He heard Baghra’s voice, far off as if she were a thousand miles away, but her words seemed incomprehensibly garbled, all he could perceive was the agitation in them. 

He felt his mouth gaping open and closed strangely, as if his muscles were brand new and unused to movement, his tongue moving sluggishly. 

He didn’t hear his voice or know his words, until later Baghra told him them:

“I couldn’t let another die.” 

 

                                                                                         *

 

The first words out of his mouth when he woke was, “Where is he?” 

His eyes were still blurry from sleep, he couldn’t even open on because of the sleep sand crusted over it, and his head was spinning from sitting up too abruptly. 

He couldn’t even see Baghra but he heard the clicking of that infernal spinning wheel of hers and anyways she never was far away. It was as if as she burrowed herself deeper into the cottage every year, a reverse kind of hibernation; rather than sleep for a time and come up for spring she dug and dug until she could avoid the life outside altogether. 

He heard the clicking stop abruptly and could imagine her turning around to face him, the tautness always drawn across her features, the glinting of her bird eyes.

There was no reply.  

“Where is he?” Aleksander repeated.

His tone was accusatory, immediately offensive and aggressive, as if he expected her to lie to him about that too, to make the man disappear like she did his father. 

He remembered Annika’s father calling Kirill a witch; he had been wrong. Baghra was the true witch, she could make whole people disappear through sheer silence. 

“He is right there before the fire.” Baghra’s voice was devoid of any emotion or any indication as to her opinion on the matter. She stated it like fact, like the sun rose every morning, the winter came after the harvest--the stranger was lying before their fire. 

Aleksander brought his hands to his eyes and rubbed the sleep out of them. He blinked and slowly his vision came into focus, at first just lurid smears of color and then solidifying into shape and contrast and texture.  

The cottage was lit only by the fireplace, creating a strange sense of submergence. With the undulating shadows and silhouette of the fire and the warmth wafting from it, it reminded Aleksander of a kind of inverse of being underwater when the sunlight was pouring in. 

He glanced at the windows even with the curtains in the way he could tell it was pitch black outside. He also now heard the sound of the wind moaning outside but it was muffled enough that he deduced they were already effectively snowed in. 

“Did you put the animals away?” He said instinctively, he wasn’t even thinking of them it just slipped out of his mouth unbidden. 

“Yes,” Baghra said with the same unemotive voice. 

“How long have I slept?” 

“A day and an afternoon.” 

Aleksander’s eyes finally swept over to the fireplace and he saw the same body he had dragged through the snow, now wrapped in one of Baghra’s woolen blankets. From where Aleksander sat the fire cast the body’s profile in stark shadow, he could make out the shape but no details. 

Aleksander slid out of the cot and stood up, his legs wobbling under his weight. He took a moment to steady himself and slowly walked towards the body. 

He felt the weakness already draining out of his own body; he had always had spectacular physical endurance, his ability to recover from injury or exposure had been something his father had even commented on once. 

“If everyone were like you, Sasha, I would have no work,” he had said, after Alekander had fallen off the roof of their house while playing and only sustained some bruises and a twisted ankle.   

Aleksander now thought it might have to do with his power; he never heard of Grisha falling ill or succumbing to regular injuries. 

By the time he reached the body he no longer felt unsteady with exhaustion. 

He knelt beside the body and was finally able to examine it in the firelight. 

It was a man, he could finally ascertain, but a horribly ill one. His face was so emaciated that his sallow skin seemed shrunken over his bone structure like wet paper. His eyes were sunken into his skull and yet seen to bulge out all at once against his skeletal appearance. 

The rest of the body was bound up in Baghra’s blanket so Aleksander couldn’t perceive anymore but what he saw was enough to have him think,  _ How did he make it up the mountain in this state? _

“Is he from one of the villages?”

Anatevka had been the only village before Staryy Korol but there were other small villages strung along the rest of the mountain range; they were the ones Baghra bought their animals and supplies from when they ran low. 

“Look at his clothes,” Baghra said shortly.

Aleksander glanced up and saw they were hanging over the fireplace drying. He stood and approached them, noting already that they were so thinned and ragged the firelight seemed to glow through them. 

When he drew close he didn’t even dare to touch them, thinking they might dissolve if he did. There was only a coat, shirt and trousers, all the same pale grey hue, and covered with so many patches they barely counted as a solid piece of clothing but rather a collage of scraps. 

There was one patch that stood out though: it was one sewn onto the arm of the ratty coat, it’s black material stark against the worn grey of the rest of it. There was a series of numbers on the patch, in white so despite the worn state and filth they still stood out clearly.

_ 21848 _ .

“What is this?” Aleksander said, motioning to the numbers. The only reference he could think of was branded animals. 

“It’s the number they give you in place of your name,” Baghra said.

Aleksander turned to her, provoked by her obfuscation. “What does that mean?”

Baghra sat in her chair before her spinning wheel, looking very witch-like with the thread pinched between her calloused fingers, the shadows caught in her eyes and the firelight casting her skin in an infernal glow. 

“That man you brought to our house,” she said and now he voice carried a sharp edge of accusation. “Is a criminal.” 

 

                                                                                              *

 

Every elder person goes through a phase of desiring isolation. Perhaps it’s the sense of disconnection with the rise of each new generation, or the overwhelming stimulation of an entire lifetime. And Alina had the bustle of many lifetimes in her head. 

She had briefly dabbled in cloistering herself away from the world. It was an easy thing for her Apparat of the time to spin it as a method of purification, severing herself from the vanities of this world. 

For some time the separation had been intensely soothing, like sinking into a warm bath, all the trouble and worries of the world rinsed away. She felt more calm than she had in decades; she slept for days on end, as if the tension of the years had left her body in a state of exhaustion she only now realized. 

She woke in the morning and had no appointments to make or demands to meet, her only responsibility was what to eat every meal and whether to go out walking or stay in an amuse herself with reading or painting. 

On her orders the servants remained unseen, doing their work when she was out or asleep; Alina could do most of it herself as it was, she had learned to cook, sew her own clothes and tend a garden. There was very little need for her servants when she lived completely alone. 

She had mostly allowed for a few only to assuage her Apparat, who she was certain had the servants reporting on her habits and state. 

It was understandable, he needed her. Ravka needed her. 

And in the end, that’s partly what drew her out of her self-imposed isolation. Ravka was all Alina had; it was the only thing older than her and the only thing that remained with her. 

To abandon it would to be not just alone, but senselessly so; she had for so long comforted herself in her endless loneliness by saying that at least it was for a purpose. It was easier to bear than random, cruel chance that cast her into a life of eternal solitude. 

The other part was that Alina realized she simply was not a person fit for seclusion. Her attempt lasted less than sixty years before she finally admitted to herself that she missed the company of others. 

She would always be distanced in someway, her age, her experience, her maturity would always separate her from her companions. But a few degrees of separation she felt were preferable to total loneliness.  

Alina had the misfortune of being a soul that required companionship. 

So she returned to Os Alta and was swept back up in the frenzied pace of the life there, the glorious melodrama of it all. Alina was not a saint who found so-called “purification” in isolation, she found more purpose immersed in the bloodstream of the lives of people.

Ever since, the role of the Sankta’s companion had become the most coveted in all of Ravka, even consort or concubine of a tsar lacked the attraction. Afterall, a tsar’s affections, like his body, would grow old and die. 

But the Sankta was faithful to those she loved, as her youth was never diminished so it was with her devotion. Her friends were provided for until their deaths and their spouses and children after them were supported, forever in her good graces. 

Alina loved the company of children in particular, she had always had a way with them even in her youth; Ana Kuya had even noted she would made a natural mother, in another life. Alina considered it the most precious compliment she had ever been given, and the most painful. 

_ In another life _ . Those who died perhaps could achieve or hope for such a possibility, but for an immortal there was only what this single lifetime provided, all it’s infinite possibilities and eternal limitations. 

Alina’s inability to bear children had always been a particularly difficult loss to reconcile within herself, and it had been a great rift between her and Malyen. She comforted herself initially with the intention to adopt children once Ravka was united and established, but by that time fresh duties and concerns had arisen. 

Once again Alina had to swallow a bitter draught; she would never bear children and never raised them, for many and a myriad of different reasons that only grew more apparent as the years passed. 

The only reason she ever told others of when asked was that she already endured countless of her friends dying in her lifetime, she could not be expected to bear the loss of a child. This was really more of an excuse than a true reason. But the other reasons were not for any but her most intimate companions to know. 

Saints need their secrets. Alina knew people honored that which resembled them in their sufferings, but not their weaknesses or faults. A blameless victim of iniquity or wholly righteous executor of justice, those were venerated. 

After all, why worship someone who was as much a sinner as yourself? Why pray for the assistance of one who couldn’t even save themselves? 

No, some things were best kept from the masses. It kept their faith strong, and consequently their hope alive. Her desires could not be fulfilled either way, so at least some could benefit from her loss. 

That knowledge sometimes provided a vague comfort; but Alina had long ago accepted there would always be this hollow aching she felt radiating from within her.

Sometimes it was in her chest and sometimes her stomach, and she knew it was because she would never hold a child of her own flesh against the one or bear it in the other. 

The Grisha at the Little Palace served as half of her comfort; she didn’t visit as often as she used to these days, but when she did the company of the children newly brought to the school were her favorite. 

The Little Palace had been constructed on her orders three hundred years ago for the purpose of rearing and teaching of Grisha. Before then though Ravka had been united and was finally established in her identity, the Grisha themselves were still scattered and even with a Grisha saint this had caused issues. 

Some Grisha found their powers difficult to command, others used them for wicked purposes, others’ powers were just too horrifying to most common folk to accept. Grisha and otkazat'sya, before united under the cause of creating Ravka, had begun to resent one another. 

Peace brought about as many troubles than war, Alina had often observed, and with less definitive and effective solutions. In war, more often than not, it was strike swiftly and with precision, in peace all had to be handled with kit gloves for fear of disrupting it. 

War was a rabid wolf that provided you with every justification to put it down, peace was a sleeping bear you had to tiptoe around in hopes it would not tear you in pieces. 

Something had to be done. Grisha and otkazat'sya had begun to have outright clashes, nothing on the level of battles, but pogroms became too common to be chalked up to old blood feuds and outskirt tensions. 

All those years of cultivating a true Ravka and it was threatened to be uprooted just as it blossomed from within. 

So Alina commissioned the creation of the Little Palace and the tsar passed a new decree: 

_ To preserve the peace of Ravka and the protection of her people, at the age of five every child would be tested for Grisha powers, if they were found to manifest them they would fall under the merciful motherhood of Sankta Alina, the Mother of all of Ravka herself, and would be raised by her own hand.  _

That had been the official legal statement, Alina made her own the next day. She had often found the people panicked at a tsar’s command and needed reassurance afterwards. 

Somewhere in the library her exact speech had been written down and preserved, but Alina recalled the spirit of it, which she felt in the end is really what the people always remembered. 

“Am I not your mother? Have I not loved you as my own? Are you not first in my heart above all? 

“Then put your trust in the sure knowledge of my love for you, the testimony of which is Ravka herself, your home and my home. 

“Give me your children and do not fear, for I will care and instruct each as I have done for you and Ravka, with all the warmth of light within me.” 

That had done it. The tsar’s declaration with its distant detachment and air of expected obedience had caused people to cling to their children only tighter. The Sankta’s heartfelt and loving plea had loosened their grips and open their hands to offer their children up. 

Afterall, what did a tsar know of their children, what love could a tsar spare, a man living in a gilded castle surrounded by the leisure of luxury and servants to his will? 

But the Sankta, she was one familiar with pain and poverty, she had been one of them once. And now she knew each child of Ravka the moment they were dedicated in the church, each name was written into her palms. Her intentions could be believed and her heart towards their child trusted. 

From then on it was almost a wonder how many parents themselves came to give over their children, some even tried to pass their otkazat'sya ones off into the Sankta’s care. As they saw it, Alina supposed, what better and more honorable life would they have than as the Sankta’s own child? 

Of course there was  _ some _ resistance, even the promise of the Sankta’s own mothering and a life of ease in the Little Palace was not enough for some parents to endure a lifelong separation of their child. 

That aspect had been added later, the rule that parents were not to continue contact with their child, after many came back requesting their son or daughter's return after feeling the sting of their loss. It only caused conflict and served to confused the children. 

Five was young enough to mourn your parents a little while but young enough to forget soon, a weeping mother or begging father only served to distress the child. 

So it was agreed that once the child was given over the parents would be given a recompense to assuage their grief. 

First they were given enough money to fulfill a life-debt, that is, the amount of gold the tsar gave to a family whose child died honorably in battle. Secondly the family also was exempt from taxes for the length of the parent's’ lifetime and none of their children would be called upon for service in the army. 

All this for the promise they would hand over their child peacefully and never reach out to them again. It had not removed all resistance, and there had been incidents Alina recalled of the oprichnik had to be sent out to “convince” a family to surrender their child. Some had tried to hide their children but Grisha powers were easily spotted and neighbors were promised a reward for reporting it.

In the end, it was for the best and safety of everyone. Grisha powers were volatile and a danger in the wrong hands; Alina recalled warlords using Grisha children as weapons in the wars before Ravka’s establishment and even barring such malevolent exploitation, a simple instant’s loss of control had caused more deaths than Alina could recall. 

Whole families had been incinerated or eviscerated by their own children, entire villages had been flooded and buildings blown down by tornados and hurricanes. When that happened otkazat'sya neighbors and relatives panicked and things spiraled out of control--children and adolescents hung or impaled or burned at the stake for “witchcraft”. 

The Little Palace had removed that almost entirely from Ravkan culture. For every gain there is some pain, everything taken must be returned in equal measure, such was the way of life. The loss of a child was incalculable but the preservation of their life and those of others was just as immeasurable. 

It had also provided Alina with a solution to her desire for a child and companionship as a whole. The residents of the Little Palace became her children, she taught them, she provided for them, she loved them as any true mother would. 

In the beginning she had been very involved in the development of the Little Palace’s structure: how the children were to be fed, dressed, educated, exercised and socialized.

It had further reassured the Ravkan people, to know their child was being practically handfed by the Mother of Ravka herself, but Alina had done it without that thought in her mind. Well, in  _ had _ been in her mind, it was her job to consider  _ all _ angles and aspects pertaining to every choice she made. It simply had not been at the forefront of her mind. 

Alina had taken genuine pleasure in being something of an actual mother; having little ones to hold in her arms, to observe them as they grew in body and mind and spirit.

She had designed the keftas each sort of Grisha would wear--red for the hearty Corporalki, blue for the wondrous Etherealki, and purple for the clever Materialki; she had sewn the first models of the keftas herself. 

(She still remembered the odd overflow of emotion the act of sewing clothes for her technical children had caused her. Ana Kuya had taught her to sew, and she had been a kind of mother; a mother was supposed to be there to see her daughter rear her own children. 

It had been such an absurd thought, Ana Kuya had been dead centuries and wasn’t truly her mother, but it had made Alina’s eyes misty all the same and consequently she had pricked her finger over and over until she bled.) 

Alina had helped choose the types of physical disciplines each would be taught in to best harness and manifest their power. She had oversaw the appointment of the best tutors in all the categories of education, every subject from reading and mathematics to science and smithery. 

She had even picked out the diet the students were to be fed, all the richest food for creating strong and healthy folk. (That had made Alina nostalgic as well; Ana Kuya taught her how to cook too.)

It had more than filled the void, at least in part, within Alina for a long time. But as with all things in life they outgrew a mother’s coddling, the Little Palace ran smoothly without her guidance and her presence caused more distractions in the end from starstruck students. So slowly she had withdrawn and limited her visits to festivals, feast days and the like. 

But as the first Apparat had told her, in life as in nature where one thing is uprooted or withers and dies another takes root and blossoms in its place. The Little Palace consolidated the Grisha in a single place and this provided Alina with a more lasting assuagement for the hollowness in her. 

Alina had many otkazat'sya companions in the past, as there were naturally more otkazat'sya born than Grisha, but it was a hard thing to watch them perish so soon. All around her faded away like mist, but at least the Grisha endured somewhat longer. 

So a century and a half after the Little Palace was built, Alina began to pick her companions from the Grisha students. 

Grisha generally lived their entire lives in the Little Palace unless given a position at court, in the Second Army, or in Alina’s personal household. Alina was officially the general of the Second Army, but it was hardly ever in use as there had been no outright warfare in years, so Alina generally found her companions either at court or at a visit to the Little Palace. 

The former is where six years ago she had found her most recent companion: Genya Safin. 

 

                                                                                     *

 

Alina had grown more fond of balls over the years. They were a very different affair than the rowdy drunken celebrations of her youth; these were poised, impeccably planned and organized. 

They had irritated her at first, the level of control that had been exerted over the act of dancing, something she had always viewed as an expression of wild abandon.

But as time passed she grew to appreciate the artistry of more modern dance, how they had taken these loose and unruly moves and transformed them into elegant and sophisticated choreography. She felt there was something of a personal metaphor in that, for both her and Ravka. 

Still Alina didn’t dance often, not from a lack of desire but mostly because it tended to upset the balance of the court when she took the floor. There was bound to be some petty jealousies inflamed if she danced with one man and not another and Alexander had more than once sent his Chancellor to her asking for her advice on how to make peace between “injured” parties. 

Alina personally suspected Alexander and his wench of a wife merely hated being upstaged since they danced at every ball and always ended up either offending one another with their choice of partners or offending their courtiers. 

But after six hundred years what did Alina care for shattering their fragile egos? Those would pass away as surely as they would. 

So six years ago Alina had sat in the throne provided for her at court and observed the dancing. Such an affair could have been at the least entertaining if the manner of Alexander’s court was not so vulgar in the displays of his wealth. 

The members were always overdressed, the women dripping with overlarge jewelry and the men spotted with meaningless medals, the clothing was hideously garish and overindulgent. As a woman whose every choice of outfit was considered by most of national importance, Alina knew empty posturing and bad taste when she saw it.  

That evening Alina had been attempting to entertain herself by making mental notes and whispered comments to her personal servants and guards on the ridiculousness of the clothing. 

She wasn’t even halfway through the event and was swiftly running out of victims, when someone milling in the crowd caught her eye. 

Upon reflection Alina was never certain if it was the toss of her red curls or the flicker of her skyblue skirt, but something bright and airy had darted between the heavy and lumbering courtiers, and Alina had immediately taken interest. 

After a moment of searching through the crowd Alina found the object of her distraction. 

It was a young lady, perhaps sixteen or thereabouts, with the most shocking head of red hair. Red was not an uncommon hair color in Ravka, but Alina was struck by not only the richness of the hue but the soft, silken texture of it. 

It was done up in a proper lady’s fashion but the style was of simple elegance, with only a single modest but lovely pearled comb keeping it in place, rather than the piled and powered extravagances of the other ladies. 

Her hair also did much to offset her complexion, it was very fair but had a rosy quality to it, which gave a glow of youth and gentleness to her soft and rounded features. 

The next aspect of the lady Alina noticed was her figure; a very defined and voluptuous shape containing a generous bust, a dramatically nipped waist, and wide hips. 

It was all highlighted by the simple blue ball gown the lady wore. It had a simple fitted bodice that quite flattered her bosom and waist, but without calling any overt attention to it such as with a scandalously low neckline or overly detailed material, as with many of the ladies. 

The skirt was far less inflated than most and gave her movements a kind of flowing quality, so the clothing followed along after her rather than her having to maneuver around it, a struggle most of the women seemed to have Alina had noted. 

Now all of these features would have only struck Alina momentarily if it were not for the true spark that immediately arrested her interest. The young lady had a spirit to her movements and to her expression, she moved easily from person to person in the crowd and engaged all with the same vivacious smile and graceful mannerisms. 

Alina had lived a long time, it usually took her less than five minutes of observation to determine whether a person was worth her time. She had decided on this girl in five seconds. 

Alina tapped one of her servants on the shoulder with her fan and pointed the lady out. Most of her servants had served her long enough to understand orders without questioning so without even a single spoken word the young lady was brought before Alina, looking properly awed.

She curtsied deeply and remained lowered, as one was supposed to in the presence of the Sankta. 

“Rise my child,” Alina said and the young woman stood up dutifully but kept her eyes downcast. “Lift your eyes, the marble floor is lovely but I have difficulty speaking when someone is looking away from me.”

The lady lifted her eyes hesitantly but obediently; they were a clear amber color that reminded Alina of drops of honey. 

“See that is much better, someone with a countenance as fair as yourself shouldn't spend their time looking downwards.” 

“Thank you Sankta,” the lady said and while her tone expressed a proper flattered tone, there was a strange edge Alina caught in her expression, a kind of restrained uneasiness. 

“Tell child, what is your name and what do you do here?” Alina asked. In the past she had known all the people at court but over the years as it had grown larger and many of its members superfluous she had stopped keeping track. 

“My name is Genya Safin and I am a maid of the Tsarista,” the lady said with the practiced air of someone who had repeated this many times.

This Genya did not have the air of a mere maid. “Maids don’t get invited to balls.”

“The Tsar in his wisdom felt it was appropriate as it was you who had gifted me to his wife, Sankta,” Genya said. 

Alina stared at her blankly for a long moment then slapped the armrest of her throne. “That is why you caught my eye, I’d seen you before! Yes, you are that little Tailor the tsarista was clamoring for!” 

Alina had remembered then; once every year on the anniversary of the founding of the alliance between Nikolai I and Sankta Alina a celebration was thrown alternatingly the Grand Palace or the Little Palace where the tsar’s court and the Grisha gathered together to commemorate their union. 

An exchange of “gifts” was an old tradition, an otkazat'sya court member for Alina and a Grisha for the Tsar. It had originally meant to symbolize the eternal trust and respect each ruler had for the other, a kind of ancient sacrificial balance. 

This was a somewhat disappointing revelation as Alina and the current Tsarist had no love lost between them. True, Alina had little love for her husband, but at least he knew how to keep a better superficial veneer of deference to her. 

“And how does the Tsarista find my gift?” Alina asked, raising her eyebrow like an expectant teacher. 

“I pray like all servants she finds me pleasing,” Genya said humbly. It was a diplomatic answer--too diplomatic, it seemed to Alina. 

She also noted that Genya seemed throughout the short exchange to be fighting the urge to glance about the room, as if expecting someone to interrupt them. 

None of the bright bubbling charm Alina had seen from across the room was in her, instead she seemed wilted like a flower in the heat of the sun. Alina wondered if she was intimidating the girl but some instinct in her told her that wasn’t the case. 

At that very moment Tsar Alexander suddenly approached her throne, coming up beside and a little behind Genya. He was dressed in a decidedly vainglorious fashion (Alina could never grow accustomed to men wearing heels) with frilled collar and cuffs, bejeweled fingers, and a powdered whig (another more recent trend she could not stomach), and it made Genya’s clothing look more appealing in it’s simple sensibility. 

Tsar Alexander inclined his head to Alina and spoke to her in his general overly florid fashion: “How is the gracious Sankta this evening?” 

Alina  _ hated  _ his slimey obsequiousness, almost as much as his wife’s outright disrespect. “Displeased,  _ moi Tsar _ , most displeased. Utterly desolated.” 

She took great pleasure in the look of alarm that crossed Tsar Alexander’s face. “Why, what has happened to distress the most kind Sankta so?”

Alina motioned to Genya, who stood now rigidly like a soldier at attention. “The fact that you have has this fine jewel hoarded and hidden amongst all your other fine gems and have not once deigned to introduce us.”  

Alina waggled her finger back and forth like she was chiding to a little child. “Very rude of you,  _ moi Tsar _ , hiding your toys like a greedy child.”

Tsar Alexander appeared torn between confusion, concern and consternation; he was an easy man to confound; he reminded Alina of one of his ancestors she used had particularly disliked and so to play at being a mad woman when he visited her just to unsettle him. Well, her Apparat at the time would have argued not all of it had been play… 

“Sankta, may I present Geny--”

“Too late, the pleasantries were already performed by myself,” Alina said flippantly but with enough of an edge to imply offense. 

Truly she didn’t care, but playing like a jealous mistress over petty rules, most far younger than herself and therefore rather superfluous in her eyes, always seemed to distress him. Perhaps it was simply the memories of all  _ his _ jealous mistresses that made even a mimicry of it terrifying to him. 

Tsar Alexander was obviously having trouble discerning the right response. “My deepest and humblest apologies, Sankta, I did not want to trouble you with a lowy serv--” 

Oh, he made this so easy it was almost a little sad.

“Lowy servant?” Alina exclaimed. She spoke just loud enough to cause some of the guests in the ball--most whom had noticed the royal host and holy guest in discussion already and were straining to hear their exchange--to jump like disturbed birds and quickly pretend to have their attention focused somewhere else. 

“Is this how my gifts to you are considered?” Alina continued, shifting her body away slightly, as if she were angered just by the sight of him. “After all the labor I and my faithful Grisha at the Little Palace do to ensure their education and excellence of character! I see it is not sufficient.” 

“No no, this was not my meaning at all gracious Sankta!” Tsar Alexander sputtered helplessly, but Alina noticed despite his distress he didn’t move even an inch away from Genya. 

She saw his hand had grabbed her elbow and she could see his fingers digging into the girl’s skin. “I only meant that I did not want to interrupt your festivities with someone who is now in my care--”

“All Grisha are always under  _ my _ care,” Alina said tightly and this time the warning tone in her voice wasn’t false. 

She saw in Tsar Alexander’s face that he realized his error. 

Authority over the Grisha had been a bitter and almost alliance dissolving contention between Alina and some of the tsars; many tsars felt the Grisha were their citizens as much as the otkazat'sya. They saw the Grisha’s singular devotion to the Sankta, even when she endorsed them, as a threat. 

The creation of the Second Army during the reign of Nikolai I’s great-grandson had nearly caused a break between her and their line, it was only when she threatened to not send it to help during a battle was the argument ended. 

“Of course they are, Mother of Light,” Tsar Alexander said, obviously using the maternal title famous among the peasants. “I meant only that I did not wish to disturb you as you seemed to be enjoying the entertainment.”

“Yes, relegated to sitting and observing others is so enthralling, there was no possible way for you to interrupt it,” Alina said dryly. She had previously chosen not to complain about these issues but she was now legitimately ill-disposed towards him. 

Genya was looking actually sickly now; all the blossom in her face had vanished and was replaced with a waxy paleness. The only color on her skin was the redness where the Tsar’s fingers still were constricting her elbow. 

Alina took in the scene; the Tsar’s particularly bumbling speeches (Alexander was many unsavory things but he tended to be very good at false but well-spoken flatteries) and Genya’s unease. 

Alina abruptly straightened in her throne and tapped the armrest with her fan. 

“It would be a shame to end this night which should symbolise our alliance on a sour note,” she said, forcing a relaxation in her voice she did not feel. “Very dishonoring to your regal ancestor; Nikolai was a good friend and I never forget my friends.”

She pretended to get lost in the memory of the first tsar but really she just needed an excuse to suppress rolling her eyes; talking to Alexander even to manipulate him was tedious.

“It would crush my soul to have angered you, Sol Koroleva,” Tsar Alexander said, now using her most authoritative title, supposedly to acknowledge their equal standing. 

“Yes, I am aware of what an affliction that would be to you,” Alina said and only just managed to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “Very well, send this girl to me tomorrow for tea and all is forgiven.” 

Tsar Alexander stared at her for a moment and then began to sputter unintelligibly but Alina waved him away.

“Give my regards to your wife and assure her I will return her maid by the end of the day.” 

 

                                                                                             *

 

Genya arrived promptly at the church where Alina lived the next day, dressed more ostentatiously than she had at the ball so Alina knew that the tsar or his wife had probably picked out her dress. 

Despite the bright green of her dress and rouge on her cheeks, she seemed even more faded than she had the evening before. All her brightness seemed to have vanished and she reminded Alina of a porcelain doll or marionette, painted and primped, but utterly lifeless. 

She was excruciatingly polite, not a curtsey or word out of place, but as she was seated across from Alina in the room where Alina entertained her guests, she sat rigidly and gripped her hands in her lap, her eyes never directly meeting Alina’s.  

Alina was accustomed to people being overcome or intimidated by her, but she was skilled at easing these anxieties when it suited her, so she realized quickly she was not the cause of Genya’s unease.

They had spent close to a half hour discussing the most basic dull pleasantries when Alina finally decided she was going to cut to the quick, in the most roundabout way possible.

Politics was surgical work, at the end of the day it was still cutting into flesh, but what made it an artform was the precision in which you performed it. 

Alina was leaning over to refill Genya’s teacup (the girl had insisted she could serve herself but Alina had dismissed that quickly by pointing out she was the hostess) and said lightly, “So tell me, how do you find Alexander?”

Genya stared at her blankly. “How do I find him, Sankta?”

“Yes,” Alina said, putting the teapot down and sitting back in her chair. “His manner towards you, his company, how do you find it?”

Genya’s hesitation wasn’t long, but it was noticeable. “The Tsar is far more...attentive to myself than I deserve.” 

Her inflection of  _ attentive _ was suspicious. And it wasn’t an answer to her question.  

“And what of the Tsarista?” Alina asked. 

“Like her husband the Tsar she very heedful to me.”

Spoken too quickly and the same deflection. 

“And the others in the court? Are they  _ heedful _ of you as well?” Alina stressed that word with her tone coupled with leveling her gaze at Genya. 

Alina’s gaze had been known to make hardened warlords cower and she could sense Genya trying not to wilt under it. 

“I am only a ladies’ maid, there is not much to attract their attentions.”

Now that was almost an outright lie, a maid to a Tsarista was always worthy of attention. 

Alina observed that Genya hadn’t stopped stirring her tea, although it was surely cool enough to drink now, and she knew it was a ploy to mask how Genya’s hands were shivering. 

“Has the Tsar begun searching for a husband for you? You’re of age.”

A quick flash of desperation crossed Genya’s face, the way an animal who has evaded capture but cannot shake its purseror has, and her voice was very short, almost as if she were out of breath. 

“No, Sankta.”

Alina drummed her polished nails on the table and watched as Genya flinched at the noise. “Hmmm, well if he doesn’t perform his duty as your lord I might have to step in, afterall I care for my own.”

A look of real, raw panic flashes across Genya’s face. She almost dropped her teacup and ended up having to set it down, a thin puddle of split tea pooling on her plate. 

“Please, there is no need to trouble yourself over me, Sankta,” she said and her voice was obviously straining to remain to stay proper and demure. “The Tsar will surely fulfill his duties towards me. There are certainly others who are more in need of your attention.”

“All children of Ravka are in equal need of my attention, for they are all mine,” Alina said firmly. “Alexander knows this.” 

Genya lowered her eyes and murmured, “Yes of course, Sankta.”

Alina let the moment sink in, the tension that Genya might have truly crossed a line or offended her. She found this tactic worked well when she then invariably switched it.

She reached out and put her hand over Genya’s, who flinched but didn’t pull away. 

“Which is why I feel the need to reassure you,” Alina said, now in a gentle tone. “Court is a place that can warp one’s perceptions with its intrigues. But if you have any need, no matter how great or small, you can come to me.” 

Alina let a little of her power bleed into her hand, creating a soothing warmth. “You are one of my own, whether you live in the Grand Palace, the Little Palace, or a cottage.”

“Thank you, Sankta, you are most kind,” Genya said softly, her body seemingly somewhat more relaxed. “I shall remember.” 

The rest of the visit went on like before, discussing things of little importance. When Genya was dismissed to return to the tsarista, Alina spent the remainder of the day and all the evening sitting in the same chair, even after the servants had cleared the table of all the dishes and leftovers and the sun had set, casting the room into darkness. 

Alina had deduced Genya’s situation almost entirely from the moment the Tsar had interjected himself into their conversation at the ball. 

She knew of Tsar Alexander’s appetite for young women; it wasn’t a very notable aspect of his character, many tsars had been the same way, most men of means were. Alina had disdain for the habit, especially having been on the receiving end of such treatment from her late husband, but there were worse habits a tsar could have. 

She had taken very conscious efforts to remain separated from this aspect of the Tsar’s affairs, as long as he had a single legitimate heir there was nothing else that concerned her. 

But this particular instance was...concerning to her. 

This young woman wasn’t a willing wanton, some peasant girl longing for status or a court lady seeking prestige (Alina never truly understood how playing the harlot gained one such things but the life of a saint is different than others, so she supposed she had to suspend her disbelief). 

Genya seemed a creature caged; there was nothing in her manner that spoke to ambition for position or a want to be desired by the ruler of a kingdom. She had the look of a spoil of war--cowering, frightened, and unwilling. 

One part of her reminded her,  _ She is just one girl. Why risk so much over so little?  _

She couldn’t just rise up and snatch Genya out of the Tsar’s lascivious grip; firstly, she technically belonged to the tsarista. Secondly, Genya had been given as a gift specifically to remind of the bond between the Sankta and the Lantsov line; to take her back would send a strange and sour message. 

Genya was young and the Tsar for all his lust was neither a violent or terribly focused man; he would bed her, reward her with jewels and a respectable marriage, and forget her. 

There was a proper method to keeping a mistress these days, as absurdly paradoxical as that seemed to Alina. It was better than in the olden times when they were simply peasant girls taken and abandoned, reputation and future ruined. 

Girls were taken care of these days, compensated for their loss. Sometimes they were left better off for it. Surely a marriage to a rich courtier was a worthy exchange for a loss of purity; enough pearls could make up for that. 

She wasn’t the first girl to experience this, she wouldn’t be the last. 

But the another part of Alina said with a voice that twisted and pierced like a thorn in her side, _ I was once one girl. One sets a standard.  _

Alina had noticed in life that the strongest and truest convictions rarely waxed eloquent. There was a simplicity to the truth, a central nerve that thrummed instinctively. 

The next afternoon she had her makeup applied heavily to hide the signs of her sleepless night, clothed herself in one of her simplest dresses and gold diadem, and called on the tsarista.

Alina had long had a theory that many of the tsaristas resented her for uspering their place in a manner. No matter what a tsarista wore, how well mannered she was, the extensiveness was her education, or the magnitude of her beauty, she would always be compared and fall short of the Sankta. 

The fact of the matter was there was no room for another female mystique in the hearts of the Ravkan people. Alina provided all the feminine nurturing and mystery desired. A tsarista therefore was usually resigned to the role of producing an heir and little else. 

With that in mind, Alina still held this particular tsarista’s haughtiness against her. 

This was supposed to be a casual visit but the tsarista had decked herself out in a gratuitously overdone fashion. Her makeup Alina noted most of all, the excessive powering coupled with overly rouged and red lips made her resemble some kind of undead blooddrinker from old wives’ tales. 

Poor Genya, the artist who was obviously forced to create this travesty, had been sitting aside in the room with the other ladies of the tsarista, head properly lowered as she busied herself with embroidery. 

Alina had sat herself across from the tsarista at a little breakfast table laden with a copious amount of food, some still so freshly made that they couldn’t even eat it for fear of burning their tongues. 

The first quarter of an hour was spent in the customary idle chit chat that took the place of a sensible and simple “good morning”. 

Alina asked about the health of the Tsar and the tsareviches (there had been two heirs at the time, but not for much longer). She commented on the redecorating the tsarista had done to her rooms (none for the better). 

She inquired the state of the tsarista’s pets (she had these wretched yapping mops of fur she called dogs that Alina was always tempted to roast and eat for a light meal). 

She asked what boyar’s houses the tsarista planned to stay with during the Tsar’s annually tour of Ravka (and by tour that meant staying at the richest families palatial estates, wining and dining and dancing).  

It was tedious but it finally provided her with a segway into her true intentions. 

“How many of your lady’s maids do you intend to take this year?” Alina asked smoothly, popping a spongy sweet cake into her mouth. “I would travel with a smaller retinue if I was permitted but the demands of my work requires such preparation I can’t step into my own garden without fifty following after me.” 

“I take all my lady's maids with me on tour, you never are certain what situation you come across,” the tsarista said.

“Ah, what a shame, I was so hoping to borrow that girl of yours...what was her name?” Alina paused, glancing upwards as if in recollection. “The one with red hair, who did your makeup so beautifully the other evening. I was quite disappointed with my appearance that night in comparison to yours.” 

What a gratuitous piece of flattery, by the tsarista had about as much sense of restraint as her husband--if it was shiny enough, big enough, pretty enough, they swallowed it whole. If poison was made sweet enough they would drink it. 

Alina saw the tsarista swell with pride at her compliment. “Yes, Safin always comes with me. She’s invaluable.” 

“I can see that. Perhaps when you return we can discuss you lending her to me from time to time. Her work is extraordinary.”

She could see the the tsarista balk here. Alina always believed her marriage to the Tsar failed more on account they are far too similar; the greedy and grasping creatures they were, they must have always been crossing each other reaching for the same treat. 

Alina was counting on it. 

Before the tsarista could speak, Alina cut in quickly: “Oh forgive I have forgotten you have a lord and master!”

She reached across the little table and patted tsarista’s hand like a mother would a child; she could feel the tsarista resisting the urge to pull away. 

“Pardon my insistence, I have been unmarried for so very long, I am continually forgetting married women must bring account of their actions to their husbands.” Alina drew her hand back, shrugging lightly. “Well, when you have asked the Tsar’s leave please do inform me.”

“Safin is of my household, not Alexander’s,” the tsarista said coldly. “I may do with her as I please, he has no authority in the matter.” 

“Ah.” Alina picked up her teacup and glanced aside, as if attempting to hide an expression. “Well in that case I don’t want to cause... _ other _ complications.”

The tsarista’s eyes took on an icy quality. “Such as?” 

“Well, Alexander seemed so…” Alina feigned searching for an appropriate term. “ _ Attached _ to the girl. I would hate to deprive you both of her companionship at the same time.”

The atmosphere in the room went taut like a noose. Alexander’s indulgence with women, even those employed by his wife, was infamous and even the tsarista’s well-known vengeance against his playthings did not deter him. 

Alina nearly felt a twinge of guilt exploiting another woman’s marital woes, given her own past. 

But even the unrighteous have miseries; there was little point in mourning for them. And Alina had given up mourning for most things, much less someone like the tsarista.  

“Alexander has enough companionship,” the tsarista said in a nearly lethal tone. “One girl will not desolate him.”

“Well, in that case, if it truly will not disturb your husband---”

“It will not.”

“...Then if you could do me the favor free her to come and attend me some days I would be most appreciative.” 

The tsarista gave a razor-thin smile and lifted her own teacup to her bright red lips.

 

                                                                                    *

 

Genya was ushered into Alina’s private chambers later that year, promptly after the Tsar and his tsarista’s return from their tour of Ravka. 

She looked a little worse for the wear, a touch paler and thinner, her eyes seemed to dart about more as if she were anticipating a loud noise. 

A snowflake didn’t fall in Ravka that Alina didn’t hear of; she knew the Tsar and his wife had done nothing but quarrel the entire tour. And though they had more than enough accusations to hurl at one another from the span of their twenty-five year marriage, it seemed this time it all looped back to the red-headed Grisha.

Alexander had apparently been adverse to Genya going to serve Alina, claiming the households of the Tsar and Saint should not overlap—which was actually an intelligent argument that could have held real weight at some point in the past. Alina recalled there being some minor political and social tiff on that front before.

Unfortunately the Sankta was so interwoven with the tsars in the eyes of Ravka Alexander might as well have complained of snow arriving with winter, one brought the other. 

And in the end his tsarista would have none of it. She insisted it was a great honor and compliment to them for the Sankta to so desire something of hers, it spoke to the dignity and sophistication of their household. Also—she was very adamant to point out—Genya was  _ her _ maid and she might do what she pleased with her. 

The words that apparently ended the argument was the tsarista declaring, loud enough for their servants to hear without even pressing against the walls or keyholes: “You may command Ravka,  _ moi tsar _ , but I am not some cowering serf or some fainting maid—you do  _ not  _ command me.” 

In Alina’s age, a peasant woman would have been struck for speaking so to her husband, at the very least, much less a taarista to the lord and master of all of Ravka. But time had changed and Alexander’s lusts were only rivaled by his laziness; one pretty maid apparently wasn’t worth his wife’s temper.

So Genya was brought into Alina’s private chambers, a satchel containing her cosmetic ingredients. Alina called her over to her side as she sat before her vanity and kept up a stream of inconsequential talk while Genya tested her paints and powders silently. 

After an hour, when Genya was cleansing Alina’s face with damp cloths, Alina said, “So your mistress has explained that you will be attending me when I request it, yes?”

“Yes, Sankta.”

“It will just be events here in Os Alta, balls and suchs, but sometimes for the feast days, so you’ll have learn to be quite dramatic with your cosmetics. But I’m sure you’ll manage it.”

“Thank you, Sankta.”

Alina abruptly turned to face Genya, looking at her directly in the eye. Genya fidgeted, as most did, Alina knew her gaze unsettled even the most wizened and hardened of souls. Centuries’ worth of weight was held in them, after all. 

“This means you’re part of my household as well, you understand?” She said gently; she needed to be direct but not harsh with the girl in this moment. 

Genya seemed confused and perhaps suspicious of this statement, merely nodding silently, obviously not wanting to risk the accountability of a verbal acceptance.

Alina understood; to be part of another household was to challenge her loyalty to her tsarina, servants had been executed for such things in the past.  

Alina reached out and took Genya’s hands in her own, releasing just enough of her power so her grip was soothingly warm. She had learned long ago just how much to use to relax someone rather than startle them. 

Genya was clearly startled enough, to be touched by the Sankta was a high honor only Alina herself could give; even the Tsar himself could not touch her unless she reached for him first. 

“I know it’s hard to be a Grisha in the court. I know how the otkazat'sya can be, especially when you came already older into their world.”

She felt Genya’s fingers twitch and her schooled polite expression falter slightly. 

“Otkazat'sya and Grisha live side by side but one only had to look at the fox and the rabbit to see that means very little in their interactions.” Alina shrugged, keeping eye contact with Genya. “It isn’t either good or bad, it simply is the way of the world.” 

Alina could sense Genya’s stiff formality beginning to slip, tension was draining from her face, the way it does from a child when its mother is speaking to it. 

“And I know how the Grisha can be, when one of their own doesn’t live within the preminters of the Little Palace.” 

At this Genya clearly reacted; her lips pursed and twitched. Alina knew intimately the expression of someone holding back a sudden onslaught of tears. 

“I know what they say about the Grisha given to the tsar. I know they question your loyalty to me, claim you’ve been “ruined” by the corruptions of the court.”

At the word “ruined”, Genya’s eyes had fallen down to floor and her head drooping like a wilted blossom, she seemed to be trying to pull into herself like a turtle. 

Alina reached out with one hand and lifted her chin her up gently. Genya wouldn’t look at her but Alina didn’t need her to at the point. Genya only needed to listen, the truth comes by hearing. 

“Only  _ I _ say who is ruined and who is not amongst my flock,” Alina said firmly. She stroked Genya’s pale cheek with her thumb. “And I see no blemish or stains in you.” 

Alina could feel Genya starting to shake slightly from holding her emotions back. This time Alina took Genya’s face in both her hands and carefully compelled her to look in her eyes.  

“It was I who made the Grisha who and what they are, just as I made Ravka. Their names, their colors, their purpose, I declared it all, just as I named the mountains, the plains, the rivers in Ravka. 

“So whoever I say is mine, is, for I was the one who gave names to the nameless, an order to the chaos, a crown to the tsars. They all needed a saint to make them who they are; I needed no one to become a saint. 

“Just because you live and serve in the Grand Palace rather than the Little Palace does not mean you stopped being a Grisha. You will always be one of us. Because I say it and will it, just as I said and willed Ravka and the first tsar to be.” 

Genya’s eyes had gone bloodshot and her lips were white like snow, she was shivering as if she were taken with fever, all in an attempt to hold back the emotion Alina could sense surging to the surface. It was like the snow that coated the mountains, another whisper would send it all cascading down. 

Alina brought Genya’s face close and spoke low so Genya alone would hear her next words. 

“So, if the Tsar, or his wife, or any in the palace for that matter, ever presume to harass or abuse you, in any way, come to me. Do not be afraid. You are mine, dedicated and consecrated, and I take care of my own.” 

The whisper did its work. 

Genya’s face crumpled like a paper crushed in a fist and tears gushed down her face, all the cosmetics on her face running down like paint on a canvas. 

Her first sob sounded like it had been wrenched out from some deep place in her belly, it sounded closer to retching. But when Alina drew her into her arms and stroked her hair, rubbing her back in circles with hands warmed with the heat of her power, Genya finally wept in earnest.

She wept the way distraught infants do, raw and unrestrained, the sound a soul makes in panic at having no words to explain their distress. Alina had always wondered what it was like for a newborn, to have been wrapped in water and warmth, and then suddenly compressed and driven out into the brightness and cold.

Perhaps it felt like the start of her sainthood had. They did say infants who didn’t cry were either dead or sickly. It seems the only way a thing could survive was to take the pain they were given and find a way to spew it back out. 

Genya kept trying to talk but her words were choker by her sobs, so Alina simply shushed her calmly and kept holding her. 

Genya was only able to finally speak when she fell on her knees before Alina, as if she needed the energy it took to stand to force the words out. She looked up at Alina with eyes swollen and still streaming with tears, her face powder washed out and smeared kohl and rouge. 

“I will serve you faithfully all my days,” she choked out between hitching breaths.

Alina smiled and brushed the wisps of hair that had fallen into the girl’s face. “You have always been a faithful servant. I never doubted it.” 

Genya covered her face this time and Alina lay her head in her lap. She let the girl cry for another good fifteen minutes, the girl needed it and Alina had played comforter many times in her life.

It was better than comforting the dying ironically; the dying  cried less but she could also do less, those who cried lived, like the screaming newborns, and she could help the living.

When she had finally recovered Alina helped her hide the signs of her weeping; holding damp handkerchiefs against her eyes until the swelling subsided, tenderly cleansing her face from the makeup, brushing her hair out again. 

Genya was so limp and weak from all her weeping, so it was very much like caring for a baby, and Alina found it strangely soothing. When she had done she painted Genya’s face again, like little girls did with the new glass dolls they made these days, then kissed her on the forehead and blessed her before sending her back to the Grand Palace. 

“I will summon you again soon and we will talk more,” Alina had assured her. “For now return to your mistress and submit to her.”   

Alina had then gone to take a very long warm bath and then lie in her bed for the rest of the day. She had a sense of deep satisfied with the turn of events; she had become accustomed conformity, she hadn’t needed to exert herself even in this minor way in some time. 

It was strangely encouraging to be reminded of her place in this world; usually it was simply apathetic acceptance and other times it was a despondent resignation. But that day, she felt a slight tingling within, a small echo of the rush she used to feel in her early days of sainthood. 

The feel of power. The authority to give and take, to allow some to live and command others to die, to raise a soul up and to then dash another. 

She thought of Alexander and his wife, all their desperate grasping at the little power they had, like children holding tightly to a toy sword, a mockery of the real object of authority. 

She smiled at the thought. 

_ When Alexander and his wife are long dead and returned to dust, I will remain _ , she thought and for the first time in a while the idea of her longevity was not so bitter. 

Ravka was hers, and all that lived in it; she had merely loaned it to them. In the end, her will would form it, not theirs. Her constant remaining hand would keep it the reflection of her image. 

She had fallen asleep that night with a smile on her lips. 

 

                                                                                     *

 

Prisoner 21848 condition was worsening.

He had been curled up before the fire for two whole days, wrapped in all the spare furs and covers in the cabin, and yet he had not woken and his body continued to shudder violently, his breathing was audibly laborious and his coughs violently prolonged.

Aleksander didn’t know what to do. He had cared for sick animals many times before, but usually when their livestock became this sick he took the gun off the wall and put the barrel to their heads. 

And the way Baghra stole glances at the prisoner, Aleksander felt that was the idea forefront in her mind. She hadn’t gone near him for the two days he lay before their fire, circling around him as if he were a serpent coiled to strike.

Yet she hadn’t referred to him since the day Aleksander had woken; again, it was as if her silence would somehow void his existence, make him disappear just as it had Kirill, Annika and her father, all of Anatevka, and Aleksander’s power. 

Aleksander spent the hours sitting beside the man, listening to his wheezing breaths and every so often reaching to touch his soaked, searing forehead. He tried to give him water and soup to drink but the man nearly choked on the smallest sip. 

The sense of helplessness was intolerable; Aleksander was accustomed to knowing what to do. And it infuriated him that he could so easily figure out a method to slay a bear but had not a single solid idea of how to spare this man’s life.

Why was taking life so much simpler than sustaining it? 

The second day was drawing to a close, Aleksander could tell even without the aid of the sun, and he had sense of certainty that comes with being surrounded by the cycle of death and rebirth of nature that the stranger would be dead by this time tomorrow. 

_ Perhaps if Kirill had brought me to work with him, perhaps I would know a way _ , he thought, gazing down at the man’s wet and waxy face. 

He hadn’t thought of his father in so long, his memories had been buried down so deep within it seemed as it he were thinking about a stranger, his very body reacted as if to an illness, his stomach tightened and twisted. 

He had always been told it’s a harder thing to close a door than to open one; with thoughts of Kirill came other memories. 

He recalled Annika’s father, his breath pungent with kvass and his face red with wrath: 

_ “Your gifts and those of your witch parents can only bring ruin.” _

_ Your parents weren’t the witches,  _ a cold voice in the back of his mind hissed.  _ You were. Everyone you touch perishes. And this one will die as well.  _

Aleksander’s stomach wrenched so violently he actually bowed over slightly, shifting slightly so if he retched it wouldn’t fall on the stranger.

_ I haven’t been sick a day in my life _ , he thought. He had eaten nothing new or strange. 

Or course the stranger was new. But his illness Aleksander couldn’t catch. Grisha didn’t catch illnesses. 

But he now felt achy, his bones themselves seemed to be sore and swelling beneath the skin. His hands hurt most, they felt drawn tight like the wool at Baghra’s spinning wheel and moving the joints in them was like turning a door on rusty hinges. 

He stared down at them, as if looking at the surface could explain to him what was going on beneath. 

_ If Kirill had taught me his work, I could tell. I could have been a healer, if he had taught me _ , he thought numbly. Was he blaming Kirill? Was he just stating truth? What was he thinking? 

_ No, you are cursed,  _ the other voice spoke. The voice that had told him to leave the stranger in the snow, the voice that had declared he would cut down Annika’s father, the voice that allowed the silence of his mother to stifle him. 

_ You were born of stone and darkness. Stone never wavers, never grows, never changes. Darkness never fades, even in the sun, it only hides, it sticks under your heels even at noon. No amount of teaching could change your nature.  _

He remembered his dream of Sankta Alina, of her hands stained with black after touching him. 

_ White hands, black hands. _

_ Black hands, white hands. _

He could still remember how white her gown had been, so brilliant it burned behind his eyes when he shut them. 

_ White dress, blue dress, red dress, blue dress, red dress reddressreddress  _ **_REDREDREDRED—_ **

“Aleksander!” 

Baghra’s voice was so uncharacteristically shrill and right next to his ear. Aleksander flinched away and stared at her. She had been in the kitchen, sitting at the table mending something, when had she come to kneel beside him? 

When he looked at her Baghra’s eyes seemed to be moving about like a blind man’s, trying to fruitlessly find a focal point. 

“Aleksander, I need you—” 

Why wasn’t she looking at him? Why did her eyes keep darting about? 

“Why don’t you look at me? Can you not even stomach the sight of me now?” He hadn’t intended to say that, it simply came spitting out of him. 

Baghra was now the one who flinched, he could tell she was trying to resist it, her body was wound like her balls of yarn. 

“Listen Aleksander—”

_ “Now listen closely Aleksander: I want you to take all that silence and stillness you breathed in and I want you to imagine bundling it all up inside you, wrap it over and over until it is as small as you can make it. Then let it sink deep into your stomach until you don’t feel it anymore.” _

“Why is that your answer to everything? My silence? Can’t I speak in my own home now?” 

He felt a terrible upheaval in his stomach and kept thinking he was about to vomit, but he couldn’t stop himself from yelling. 

“I already can’t speak of Papa, or Anatevka, or anything to you. Do you think your silence will finally rid you of me, that I’ll fade away and you will be free?” 

He really should stop before he retched, he felt so nauseous the room seemed to have lost all sense of structure, he couldn’t even feel the floor beneath him anymore. Yet he didn’t feel frightened, he didn’t feel anything, he felt strangely too full to feel. 

_ Perhaps some of my vomit will get on Baghra,  _ he thought, a razor’s edge of spite lining the thought.  _ She will be the dirty one this time. Why am I the only one with red hands here?  _

_ Red dress, red hands, black hands, blackblackBLACKBLACK _ **_BLACK—_ **

“Aleksander I cannot see you!” Baghra shouted. 

Aleksander stared at her, the strangeness of her statement working something like slap, he simply was too shocked to respond. 

After a moment he said, “What are you talking about?”

“Aleksander, I can’t see you at all,” Baghra spoke and this time she lowered her voice as if trying to keep him calm. Or herself, perhaps. 

“I see you,” he said. “I see you perfectly.”

_...But I don’t see anything else _ .

He suddenly realized why the room had seemed so unbalanced—there  _ was _ no room. Everything was gone, even the stranger. 

Everything was black. 

The naeusa had left, now Aleksander felt cold, as cold as the wind that blew outside. 

_ I can’t hear the wind either _ , he realized. It was like a bell jar had been lowered over him, every sound, sight and sensation was entirely cut off.

Cut. Like Annika had been cut.

_ Why can’t I remember her being cut in half? Why do I just see a red dress? Where are her bones, her blood, her entrails? I gutted a girl before a gutted an animal.  _

**_Why can’t I remember that?_ **

“Aleksander, you need to calm down,” Baghra’s voice had risen again, it had a hoarse edge and it occurred to him perhaps she had been yelling at him for some time. 

How much time had passed exactly? Was it the next day?

Was the stranger dead by now?

He turned away from Baghra towards where the stranger was, or where he thought the stranger was, there was no way to tell in the blackness. 

But he saw him now, as clearly as if there were a shaft of light shining directly on him. Except, no, it wasn’t like seeing through illumination. There were no depth or texture or color, it was like seeing a mold of a person, as if the darkness draped over them like a shroud and he could see the outline through it. 

He leaned over the stranger, suddenly afraid to touch them, and felt a very damp breath hit his face. 

It was as if that sickly breath brought life back into the room, he suddenly could hear the man’s wheezing, smell the stench of his filthy and sweat soaked clothes, properly  _ see _ his pale face in the firelight. 

And firelight meant he now could actually see everything else again, the walls, the boarded windows, Baghra’s spinning wheel. He could hear the fire crackling and the window wailing, he could smell the wood burning and the leftover soup in the kitchen, and feel the warmth of the stuffy cabin. 

He clearly heard Baghra’s shuddering exhale of relief. 

“Mama?”

He then heard her inhale sharply, he hadn’t called her anything but Baghra in a long time. “Yes?”

“This man is going to die.”

A pause. “Yes.”

“You must help him.”

Another pause, a little longer this time. “He is very weak, Aleksander, he was dying already when you found him. There’s—”

“Perhaps I worded myself incorrectly.” Aleksander turned to her again and looked her directly in the eye. “You  _ will _ help this man.” 

“I don’t know how—”

“You used to help Papa sometimes with his patients. You know enough to help him.” 

“He can barely swallow and I have nothing in the house—”

“Mama, there’s something I wanted to ask you for a long time,” Aleksander cut her off. He waited for a moment for the tension to build up, enough time to see Baghra resisting the urge to spur him on. 

"Were you even there?” he said finally. 

She blinked, dumbfounded. “What?”

“When they hung my father. Where were you when your husband was hung?”

Baghra stared at him with an expression that was equally astonishment and horror. It was what Aleksander imagined a wild animal felt when a bullet when through it.  

“Were you hiding, like you have for the last ten years?” Aleksander’s voice was so cold and detached it was like he cut it out of the ice atop the mountain.  

“Did you help him stitch Annika’s body back together or kill her father? What did  _ you _ do for me, ever, except drag me up this cursed mountain and hide me here?”

He leaned forward and she pulled back, whether it was from fear of his words or his power he did not know but he felt a terrible, incredible swell of power. Now she was the silent one, now she was the one suffocated by him. It was as good as moving Staryy Korol itself. 

“Papa lied for me, he killed for me, he died for me. You—” Here he pointed a finger at her, like he was casting a curse on her, and somehow he felt he was just by speaking, by finally saying what had been sitting in his belly for ten years. 

_ Even the mountains will bow or move if you know their names. _

“You’ve barely spoken to me. You won’t even touch me, like I’m covered in filth. You haven’t been a real mother to me since the day my father died.” 

He stood up and he even though she was kneeling so the comparison was not accurate, he abruptly realized how very tall he now was, he wouldn’t have to even stretch his arm to touch the ceiling. 

“So hear me Baghra Vladimirova, if you deny me this one thing, I will walk out that door and go into the mountain from whence I came, and you shall never see my face again. No husband, no son.

“What will you do then,  _ Mama? _ ”  He leaned down and thrust his face into hers at the last word, lacing the term of affection with so much spite it stung even leaving his mouth. 

The silence between them was like no silence he had experienced before. Except perhaps that first time when he had woken after killing Annika, wrapped in the blackness, and it was as if all sound had been obliterated. 

Baghra stared at him for he did not know how long, it could have been seconds or hours. Her expression had been drained of any shock or horror and she simply looked at him blankly, as if she had suffered a blow to the head. 

Finally, she stood up, very slowly as if her body were in pain. She went over to the stranger and bent over him, laying her hands on him.

After a moment she said, “Go boil some water and bring me fresh cloths.” 

 

                                                                                          *

 

Baghra and Aleksander worked together, silently, just as they had for the past ten years.

Aleksander saw her laying her hands on the stranger many times and wondered if a heartrender could use their powers to heal. But he didn’t ask. 

After five days, the man’s breathing became easier and a little color came to his face. 

Three more days and he was able to open his eyes, very slightly and full of water, like a newborn kitten. 

Two more days and he could stomach a full bowl of soup. 

It was another two weeks before he finally spoke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First, I want to deeply apologize for the absurd gap between updates. Hurricane Irma (we're totally fine btw, the power was just out for four days) and an upper respiratory infection (terribly provoking, but not as bad as when I had bilateral pneumonia) threw me off my writing groove completely. 
> 
> I intend after this to try and attempt a strict two month updating habit, but "attempt" being the operative word since I also just got my first job (SQUEEEE!!!) so I'll have to work around my new schedule. But rest assured I am dedicated to writing and finishing this story so if you any of you really enjoy it enough to be concerned I am deeply thankful and promise I haven't forgotten this story (it's also hard to avoid since everytime I go on my AO3 account it's just sitting there JUDGING me for my neglect). 
> 
> Secondly:
> 
> Oh my God. 
> 
> This chapter.
> 
> It simply did not want to be written. 
> 
> All previous chapters have been as easy as spreading butter but this one was like breaking rocks. Every turn, every character, every plot point resisted me, I had to shake, rattle, and roll every word to get it down. I beat this chapter like a rented mule and still it's progress was like pulling teeth--from an angry tiger. 
> 
> I so many times kept considering dropping introducing Genya because her story especially had me in a headlock. But I honestly felt I needed to get her into the story right now because after the next chapter things should (hopefully) start to pick up and I didn't want to rush her introduction given what a beloved character she is and how involved she'll probably end up being with the plot. Hopefully her entrance at least is worth the trouble it gave me. 
> 
> I really wrestled with how I wrote Alina here, specifically in how she handled the Genya situation. At first I really wanted to give her a far more selfish and overtly villainous motivation, since it's important to me that Alina isn't some sinless goddess in this fic but as she is taking the Darkling's role, but it just wouldn't take no matter how I spun it. And in the end I think it worked out better that way, since some of the worst things and worst people have acted under the best intentions possible, even in the books the Darkling was operating under the belief he was doing good. And I believe a dark!Alina would probably be that kind of "evil": the one utterly and willfully convinced in her goodness. We'll see if that's how it works out as the story continues.


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